The late Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen is famous for quite a few things, most notably, the Innovators Dilemma, and How Will You Measure Your Life?. I just want to add one more great idea to his long list of accomplishments.
Nine years ago, I was visiting a friend of mine in Boston and attended church with him that Sunday. If you’re not familiar, Christensen was a Latter-day Saint and lived in the area. He was also a local church leader, in a role known as an Area Seventy. Part of that responsibility meant speaking in different congregations.
His talk that day was about the importance of spiritual seeking, and I enjoyed it just for that alone. But it was during that talk that he said something quite simple that has been useful to me ever since. Christensen was talking about the importance of questions and used the following metaphor to describe how important questions are. I don't have the exact wording, but this is basically what he said:
“Questions are the velcro that answers stick to.”
A pithy idea like this wouldn’t be just for one place or moment, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Christensen shared it before, like in this conversation with Jason Fried or this tech talk to employees of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Despite the other places he’s credited for it, I haven’t seen the idea get much traction elsewhere so I wanted to give it my own little boost.
Velcro for learning
I don’t want to belabor the metaphor, other than to say it’s so smart that it’s obvious in the moment you hear it. Think about all the data hitting your brain every day. Most of it bounces off, and for good reason. Not every fact is important enough to claim your scarce attention.
But questions are perfect receptacles for data. They help focus us enough that an answer has just the place it needs to settle in our mind. To learn and have information fit into your brain, you need the questions laid down for the answers to stick.
How do we get good questions? For starters, if you want to learn a skill or master a topic, start using it. Our deficiencies generate plenty of questions, and almost certainly the right ones.
Plus, there’s a momentum to questions. An answer, once received by a curious mind, typically leads to the next question, and to the next. I’m sure you’ve felt this before many times. (In this way, AI is an exceptional teacher, hallucinations and all, never tiring of one smart or stupid question after another.)
There’s more, though, than just making knowledge practical. I don't think that captures it fully. Not every question we have points us to practical knowledge. A question might come because we find something interesting or we find something vexing. Questions are born from curiosity, and curiosity has many different origins.
I think there are different kinds of velcro, too. Idle curiosity is idly forgotten. In this way, maybe ChatGPT is a problem, because it immediately answers without much effort from us. (Imagine AI that responded with “Why do you wanna know?”) Light questions don’t have the same sticking power as the pestering ones that intrude and demand satisfaction. I love the way David Brooks describes this kind of curiosity:
The next stage of any calling or vocation is curiosity. When you’re in love with someone, you can’t stop thinking about her. You want to learn all there is to know. Curiosity is the eros of the mind, a propulsive force. It can seem so childish. Throughout history people have been nervous around curiosity. You never know where it will take you. One of Vladimir Nabokov’s characters called it the purest form of insubordination. Curiosity drives you to explore that dark cave despite your fears of going down there. Curiosity is leaping ahead of the comfortable place you’ve settled and dragging you into the unknown.
Those sorts of questions are uncomfortable precisely because they’re waiting places, gaps we can feel in our minds. Questions are incomplete thoughts that beg for finality, but not guaranteed to get it. The natural response is one of these two: (1) to be sufficiently annoyed by questions until we find answers or (2) to yank questions out of our brains to avoid the discomfort altogether. In either case, questions have obvious power over us.
A lack of good questions is why you found a class boring, by the way. Students complain about required, boring classes as “useless,” but the real problem is that the students didn’t have any questions that the class answered. Which brings me to my next thought…
Velcro for teaching
Whether they know it or not, I think all good teachers use the velcro principle. I’m sometimes a good teacher and sometimes not, but in those moments when I'm not it's typically because I'm not giving my students good questions to start with. I remember once my brother sharing a similar metaphor as we were designing an ethics training; he said that all good training starts with a wrestle. I think another way of phrasing it is that is all good learning starts with a question that matters.
As teachers, we shouldn't expect students to bring all the good questions. Instead, we need to point them to the questions that make our teaching sticky to their brains. Jonathan Frakes had the right idea. :)
To use questions in teaching, we might point to the origins of a big idea. What made Einstein wonder about time and space? At sixteen, he wondered what a light wave would look like if he traveled at light speed:
After ten years of reflection such a principle resulted from a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: if I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest.
That question was ten years in the answering! What a great way to teach relativity, using the same questions Einstein was asking himself.
We might also evoke questions with examples, or roadmaps, or exercises. This blog post by Neel Nanda is exceptionally good and thorough. I recommend it highly.
Every great idea came in response to a question. Imagine giving that question to whoever comes up with the next one.
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I’m sure there are plenty of other places or ways that this metaphor of sticky questions has been used. But I wanted to pay a small tribute to Clayton Christensen who shared it with us that Sunday in Boston. And so in the same missionary spirit he was known for, I’ll end with a promise from the Sermon on the Mount noting how the asking comes first:
Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.