A World of Questions & Answers—Part V
Enriching Our World
Introduction
This week, in this sixth instalment of our exploration of Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic and its implications (beginning with our article “Questioning Truth”), we start relating the asking of questions to the matter of opening up an array of alternative possibilities for intervening in our situation.
—The Editors
A World of Questions & Answers—Part V: Enriching Our World
The Secret of Monk’s Magic
In March of 1976, the legendary jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), renowned for his highly original melodic twists and turns and creative dissonances in both his compositions and improvisations, was listening to Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR.
The station was broadcasting a special programme dedicated to his music, in which a guest expert came on and “began droning on about how Monk created extraordinary music, in spite of ‘playing the wrong notes on the piano’. Perturbed, Monk dialled the Columbia switchboard and left a message to ‘tell the guy on the air, “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”’”1
The Wrong Question
Thoughtful inquiry, whether in philosophy, science, the arts, business, or everyday life, ain’t got no wrong questions. And as my father taught me, “There are no stupid questions—the only stupid question is the one that isn’t asked.”
I was once working with a client I’d worked with for many years, who brought to an Interchange session a particularly challenging issue. After a few hours of intensive, analytical interrogation, one question after another, just at the point where the challenge seemed to have hardly any promising avenues left for intervention and everyone was feeling a bit stuck, I hit upon a question crying out to be asked, or so I thought, and asked it.
“No,” he said, “that’s the wrong question. Ask me something else.”
So I replied, “Oh, okay. Let me ask you this instead: Why is it the wrong question?”
“It just is.”
I was puzzled—in a decade of intensive, monthly work together on more than a hundred corporate issues, he’d never once refused to answer a question on the grounds that it was the wrong question. He had learned to just trust me and answer the questions and not worry about where this was going. So, continuing this line of questioning, I asked, “In what respects specifically is it the wrong question?”
He thought for a moment and replied, “Well, it’s the wrong question because, first of all [blah blah blah], second, [blah blah blah], and besides [blah blah blah, blah blah blah].”
“And?” I asked, still curious.
“[Well! Blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah]…” and then he started really getting into his stride, giving me multiple, further reasons why it was totally the wrong question, and he just kept on talking.
After about five minutes had elapsed since I first asked my “wrong” question, a twinkle appeared in his eye and his whole expression changed.
While I remained silent, he just continued his line of thought aloud, but faster now, warming to his point, and suddenly began talking more and more excitedly, “[Blah blah, blah blah, blah blah!…blah blah blah blaaaaaaaaah…and then…ahhh…then… that means of course that [blah blah, blah blah, blah blahhhh] and, yeah, yup, then all we’d have to do is [blah blah]! …and then, Wow! [blah blah blah!!] that’s it! That solves the whole problem! Great! …Uh…er…are we done?” He was positively beaming now.
I replied, “Well, I don’t know. Think for a moment—what is wrong with that solution?”
He mused for a few moments, pursing his lips and slightly tilting and shaking his head in exaggerated slow motion, and at last replied, exuding quiet confidence, “Nothing at all. Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s perfect! Problem solved.” And after quickly convincing me how he could be absolutely certain it would work like a charm and create the desired change, he declared, “So! Let’s go get some lunch and celebrate!”
Note that I didn’t reply near the start, “Never mind if it’s the wrong question—just answer the question, please!” Rather, I accepted his reply and asked why it was the wrong question, and in what specific respects.
In improvisational theatre or “improv,” there is the notion of an “improv gift.” Whatever your improv partner says to you on stage, you receive it gratefully, as if it were a gift, do something good with it and turn it around and hand it back to your partner, who receives your reply as a gift from you in turn, and so on. There are no missteps in improv. Everything can be utilized. There are no mistakes. Everything can be built upon and can move the improvisation forward. “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
Likewise, in the continuous improvisation and unending experimentation that is business, that is science, that is art, that is our human life, almost anything that transpires day-to-day can, when regarded as an improv gift, raise endless questions for us.
While there are no wrong questions, the most fruitful ones will be the questions that we have not yet asked.
And the most valuable of all, particularly in innovation, and indeed the very source of so much innovation in the world, in every field, will be the question or questions that no one has yet asked, …until now.
The World and Our World
We saw last time that description of reality is inexhaustible, that there is no end to the questions that we can ask of anything, and that we may come to see in an entirely different light whatever it is we thought we were dealing with, just as soon as we start asking the questions about “it” that we have not yet asked ourselves.
And we wrapped up last time with the thought that, “as soon as we start asking and answering different questions, and before we even do anything different or differently, we find ourselves dealing with what is literally a rather different world.”
Now there is the world, which as we discussed, consists of the totality of right answers to the infinity of questions that might be asked in question-and-answer complexes.
And then there is our world, which is limited to very small bit of the world, a tiny subset of the totality of true question-and-answer complexes.
“The world as I found it,”2 an infinitesimally small fraction of the world, is limited to the totality of right answers I happen to have chanced upon so far (and know to be right), answers to the relatively tiny number of questions I already happen to have asked in the course of my inevitably limited inquiries, each consisting of chains of question-and-answer complexes.
We can imagine a very primitive, invertebrate sea creature, perhaps a very ancient species of sea anemone, with a nervous system capable of making only a handful of distinctions regarding its world—and able only to classify something as being either prey, predator, mate, neutral, suitable hard surface to adhere to or not, and maybe one or two other things, and acting accordingly.
Such a creature is effectively addressing the world with only a handful of questions, and its world is relatively impoverished compared to ours. The more distinctions we draw, the more questions we ask and succeed in answering correctly, the richer our world.
However, it is not just a matter of enriching our world any old how, which we can do by asking and answering any questions we haven’t yet asked. Rather, it’s a matter of asking the right questions, the most fruitful questions, the ones that will most directly advance our inquiry.
This is the kind of question-and-answer approach that Collingwood, as we’ve mentioned previously, compared to detective work, and which he saw as the essence of a genuinely scientific approach, and this was also the approach he routinely applied in his own scientific work as an archaeologist and historian of Roman Britain as well as in his philosophical work.
As with the detective, the archaeologist and the historian, indeed the scientist in any field, needs to ask the right questions in the right order and come up with the right answers, where “right” according to Collingwood includes the criterion that the answers in these question-and-answer complexes are the ones that will do most to keep the inquiry moving forward.
Making the Invisible Visible
Such an endeavour requires two kinds of knowledge: intimate, firsthand knowledge of the territory, on the one hand, and scientific knowledge of how to identify the next question to ask and how to recognize an answer to it as being the right answer.
This often requires a division of labour.
This division of labour, as we have described in another article here in Change, is represented respectively, for example, by patient and doctor or by client and lawyer; and in our own work, by a co-design effort between the client or problem owner who brings knowledge of the territory, on the one hand, and our own scientific team bringing specialist, scientific knowledge of how to identify the key pattern that needs changing in order to catalyze the whole transformation, and how to find the smallest intervention sufficient to flip that pattern into the corresponding desired pattern in the shortest possible time.
Collingwood, in a passage we alluded to in an earlier instalment of this article, offered the example of the woodsman bringing his specialist knowledge of woodcraft.
So long as the past and present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the problems of the present. But suppose the past lives on in the present; suppose, though incapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active; then the historian may very well be related to the non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. ‘Nothing here but trees and grass’, thinks the traveller, and marches on. ‘Look,’ says the woodsman, ‘there is a tiger in that grass’. The historian’s business is to reveal the less obvious features hidden from a careless eye in the present situation. What history can bring to moral and political life is a trained eye for the situation in which one has to act.
This may seem a small gift. Surely, some one will say, we are entitled to ask for more than that. There is not much use in showing us the tiger unless you also give us a rifle with which to shoot him. The historian will not do very much to help us in our moral and political difficulties if he only makes us see the features of the situation and does not also provide us with rules for acting in situations of that kind.3
Just how grotesquely mistaken such a premature conclusion would be, Collingwood goes on to elucidate in considerable detail. To this topic, and to Collingwood’s argument on this point, we shall return shortly, and it has considerable implications for how we go about understanding our situation and intervening in it. In fact, we shall return to our woodsman and our tiger next week.
Meanwhile, note that however much we may want to be sure and ask the “right” question, there is no surefire way of telling if it’s the right question until we ask it.
Even if the answer only tells us where there’s another dead-end, that already narrows down our search in a constructive way, just as in Collingwood’s example of finding that there’s nothing wrong with the number one spark plug and that that’s not why the car won’t start. Knowing where the solution isn’t to be found is still progress.
I mislaid my glasses yesterday and had to comb through the whole house—every time they weren’t where I thought they might be, I was one step nearer to finding them, ruling out one possibility after another. It took me nearly half an hour, but by process of elimination I found them, on the floor under the sofa in a dark corner of the living room. (Why do people bother to say in such situations, as they oftentimes do, “Why, you know, it was in the very last place I looked!” as if this were a newsworthy event?)
Bear in mind too, that as in any improvisation, whether in theatre or in jazz or anywhere else, whatever the response to the question we ask, everything depends on what we do next—how we respond to the response to our question.
It’s what you follow up with that counts. Monk was a musical genius, as a composer and at the keyboard, but one key to his magic as both composer and musician, his improvisational gift, was certainly the knowledge that “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Robin D. G. Kelley in his definitive biography, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, New York, NY: The Free Press, 2009, p. 444
to borrow Wittgenstein’s turn of phrase from the Tractatus 5.631
An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 100