On a family vacation in the early 1940s, Dad's busy snapping photos for the family album. "Why can't I see the picture now?" his three-year-old daughter asks, and an industry is born.
The dad was Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid. His daughter's innocent question inspired the invention of instant photography, a cultural phenomenon for half a century.
A child's natural curiosity and freedom from preconceived ideas let her look beyond the obvious and come up with such a "silly" question, the kind of question that just might open new doors.
Some of us manage to carry that openness into adulthood. (Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, would often sit over beers, entertaining Crick's intentionally naive questions. They found in that exercise important clues to their discovery.)
More often, we learn to discount such curiosity. We learn the value of appearing to be authoritative, decisive, knowledgeable--especially if we're in leadership positions.
And when we do ask questions, many of us change the kinds of questions we ask. In board rooms and management meetings, we're taken more seriously if we ask critical questions that send an unspoken message: I know what I'm doing.
Less often do we ask unusual questions that go beyond the status quo. But those are the very questions that will move us forward.
"My greatest strength as a consultant," said Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, "is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."
Or as Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz put it, "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."