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How ‘Beautiful Questions’ Lead to
Game-Changing Innovation

In this presentation, Warren shares inspiring stories that reveal how some of today’s hottest startups and biggest product breakthroughs began with people asking bold, powerful, ‘beautiful’ questions. What can the rest of us learn from these surprising stories? Warren shares critical insights and lessons from these examples, and distills it all down to a set of practical tips and takeaways on the art of Innovative Questioning. This talk will provide the tools to enable any business leader, manager or entrepreneur to formulate the kinds of questions that can spark ideas, identify new opportunities, or help improve existing methods and processes.

Among the points covered:

The “Why/What if/How” cycle of Innovative Questioning

How to ‘step back’ and see your company/customers/industry with a fresh eye—so that you can question your own assumptions and habitual ways

How to know if you’re asking the “right” questions that can lead to better results

How to improve your questions and make them more actionable

How to engage in “collaborative inquiry,” so that teams (or the entire organization) can work together to ask beautiful questions that lead to breakthrough answers.

Leading with Questions:
How True Leaders Inquire as a Means to Inspire

What do today’s most creative, successful business leaders have in common? According to research shared in this presentation, today’s top leaders are invariably great questioners. By asking the right questions, they are able to help their organizations anticipate change and move in new directions. But it isn’t easy for leaders to embrace questioning (traditionally, leaders have been expected to “have the answers”). In this presentation, geared specifically to those in leadership or mid-to-senior management roles, Warren talks about the evolution of the new “questioning leader” in these times of greater complexity and uncertainty. He shows how great leaders are able to find the best questions to ask—and how they can inspire those around them to question more and better.

Among the points covered:

The 3 most important questions any leader can ask

The 4 questions a great leader should never ask

How a questioning leader can get even better at questioning via techniques of “appreciative inquiry”

Why people are actually more likely to follow a leader who questions

How a leader can inspire and foster a “culture of inquiry”—so that everyone else in the organization is asking good questions, too

Forget the mission statement; why every great leader should have a “mission question”

Questioning as an Engine of Transformation

Is your organization on the cusp of a major transformation? Are you implementing a new initiative or trying to bring about organizational change—perhaps in response to sweeping changes in your industry? In this talk, Warren shows how an organization can help its people at all levels to become more agile and adaptable by arming them with better questioning skills and by encouraging a more open, curious mindset. Questioning is a fundamental tool for confronting change and engaging in continuous improvement—both on an organizational and an individual level. This talk can be adapted for specific transformation programs (such as Lean Management initiatives) or for more general situations in which an organization is trying to respond to profound new challenges. It can also be geared to leaders/managers—or presented as a rallying cry to the overall organization.

Among the points covered:

Why transformation efforts must begin with fundamental questions

Why it’s so important for companies-in-transition to be able to tap into the “collective curiosity” of all their people

Why people are more likely to “buy into” change if you can engage their natural curiosity and their (often latent) desire to engage, explore, and question

How questioning can be used to rethink and reinvent existing processes

Why self-questioning skills can help individuals and teams to operate more autonomously within a larger system

How “collaborative inquiry” can help teams (or the entire organization) work together to ask beautiful questions that lead to breakthrough answers.

EDUCATION-THEMED PRESENTATION:

Why Aren’t We Nurturing Kids’ Natural Ability to Question—and What Can Parents and Schools Do About That?

Children are natural questioners, asking hundreds of questions a day between the ages of 2 and 5. But then kids go to school and questioning falls off a cliff, displaced by rote memorization and standardized tests.

As Warren shows in this presentation, we are doing a great disservice to our young people if we allow their “questioning muscles” to atrophy—because questioning is key to learning, and people who are comfortable raising and tackling difficult questions are more likely to flourish in the innovation-driven world of tomorrow.

Johns Hopkins students and faculty

In this talk, Warren shares practical ideas and strategies for encouraging more questioning in today’s classrooms, including insights and tips from The Right Question Institute (a renowned nonprofit education reform group that has pioneered new question-teaching methods). This presentation includes fun question-formulation exercises, and is ideal for audiences of teachers, parents, students, education conferences, school district summits, university events, or any gathering where there is a strong interest in learning, curiosity, and the future of education. [Read what schools are saying about Warren’s speaking.]