Smart Questions: Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results

Review
“Smart Questions and the concept of the Smart Questions Approach are long overdue, and I only wish they had reached my desk 40 years ago. Getting the right people involved at the onset and defining and then seeking ‘an expanded purpose’ are obvious to me now. I wish they had always been so.”
—Paul Torgersen, president emeritus and John W. Hancock Chair of Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

“Smart Questions is a must for nonprofit business. The Smart Questions Approach definitely jump-started our staff in planning and thinking differently about solving problems. Our staff now gets creative solutions by asking Smart Questions.”
—Michael Jackson, president and CEO, Drew Child Development Corporation, Los Angeles

“The ideas in Smart Questions are very intriguing and helpful. It’s the first book I know of to give structure and substance to the cliché that a person faced with a problem (or an opportunity) should first search fo r the right questions, rather than for the right answers. Bravo! The book will surely move the reader a long way toward thinking creatively.”
—Steven B. Sample, author of the best-seller The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership and president, University of Southern California

“Distilling from many years of successful consulting to leading innovators in business, the arts, and public and private organizations, the authors have crafted an engaging, practical ‘how to’ primer for learning what it takes to build the personal, interpersonal, and organizational bases in knowledge and understanding that support successful innovation.”
—Edward O. Laumann, George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and the College, University of Chicago

“Smart Questions penetrates to the core of what creative managers intuitively do. It provides major insight into how to attend to and leverage the social, physical, and organizational context of a problem. An excellent blend of modern and postmodern thinking.”
—John Seely Brown, coauthor of the best-seller The Social Life of Information and former chief scientist and director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

Book Description
Smart Questions offers an entirely new framework for creating solutions. Drawn from the authors' many years of research and field experience, the Smart Questions Approach reveals how the leading creators of solutions in almost every profession and walk of life—including business, government, education, and even in families—think and approach their assignments. The author’s holistic thinking approach shows how to use three “foundation” questions—focusing on uniqueness, purposeful information, and systems—which must be explored for every problem. These three questions, an essential starting point for exploring problems, in turn lead to other key questions that will ultimately create effective solutions.

Download Description
Smart Questions offers an entirely new framework for creating solutions. Drawn from the authors' many years of research and field experience, the Smart Questions Approach reveals how the leading creators of solutions in almost every profession and walk of life—including business, government, education, and even in families—think and approach their assignments. The author’s holistic thinking approach shows how to use three “foundation” questions—focusing on uniqueness, purposeful information, and systems—which must be explored for every problem. These three questions, an essential starting point for exploring problems, in turn lead to other key questions that will ultimately create effective solutions.

Book Info
Text offers a new framework for creating problem-solving solutions. Shows how to use three 'foundation' questions: focusing on uniqueness, purposeful information, and systems; which must be explored for every problem. DLC: Problem solving.

From the Inside Flap
There are many reasons that business leaders, managers, and private individuals go about problem solving in the wrong way. As Gerald Nadler and William Chandon point out, most people have learned to use the wrong framework or paradigm for working through issues and problems. In essence, they approach problems using a thinking mode that leads to excessive if not pointless data collection, analysis-paralysis, and static solutions that tend to only patch up the situation for a short period of time.

Smart Questions offers an entirely new framework for creating solutions. Drawn from the authors' many years of research and field experience, the Smart Questions Approach reveals how the leading creators of solutions in almost every profession and walk of life—including business, government, education, and even in families—think and approach their assignments. The author’s holistic thinking approach shows how to use three “foundation” questions—focusing on uniqueness, purposeful information, and systems—which must be explored for every problem. These three questions, an essent ial starting point for exploring problems, in turn lead to other key questions that will ultimately create effective solutions.

Smart Questions will completely retrain the reader to become a more intelligent thinker and a better creator of solutions—with an ability to develop creative, purposeful, long-term answers in a wide range of situations.

About the Author
Gerald Nadler is president of the Center for Breakthrough Thinking Inc., an international firm of consulting affiliates promoting Smart Questions and other planning and solution-finding approaches. He is also IBM Chair Emeritus in Engineering Management at the University of Southern California. Nadler has written over two hundred published articles and fourteen books, including the second edition of Breakthrough Thinking: The Seven Principles of Creative Problem Solving (with Shozo Hibino, Prima Publishing, 1994), a first-edition selection of the Fortune Book Club, Book-of-the-Month Club, Newbridge Book Club, FastTrack Best Business Books on Tape, and one of Computerworld's Best Books of 1990.

William J. Chandon is a vice president of the Center for Breakthrough Thinking and teaches management at St. Mary’s College. He has over fifteen years’ experience in the fields of organizational development and business transformation and has consulted with many and varied government, non-profit, and commercial businesses from many industries.