Learn Faster and Innovate with Integrative Questions
My conversation with Phyl Terry, the CEO of Collaborative Gain, was ostensibly a job interview, but it was unlike any other I’ve ever had. He first asked me where I was from. “A small farming town called Modesto, population 200, in Central Illinois,” I said. “But I’ve lived in Chicago for 20 years.”
“Huh,” he said, with genuine curiosity in his tone. “How do you see the world differently, because of the experience of living in such different places?”
Phyl’s question surprised me, and so did my answer as I expounded on the distinct worldview I’ve developed as a result.
You recognize Phyl’s question as an open question, of course. Open questions show genuine curiosity by making a wider range of answers possible. (A closed question, in contrast, has a predictable response—yes or no, for example.)
But Phyl’s question was not just an open question, it was also a great example of an integrative question. An integrative question combines two or more concepts, ideas, skills, or fields of inquiry. Integrative questions push us to mix and match our thinking, while we generate new ideas and deepen our understanding. These questions are great for learning and problem-solving; in fact, answering integrative questions has been found to help students perform better on tests*.
Here’s a different integrative question: what would it be like if our church were more like a neighborhood bar?
This question integrates two concepts, places of worship and local bars. You can see how that conversation might evolve, right? I can almost hear someone making an initial joke: “Sermons would be more tolerable with a beer in my hand.” But then the conversation would deepen—maybe we imagine that the bar is a place where everyone is welcome, without judgment. Where everyone knows your name (cue the Cheers theme song) and we miss you if your bar stool is empty. You get the idea.
Integrative questions help us transfer the learning we have in one area to the learning we need in another area. They deepen our understanding and improve our range of thinking. Integrative questions can be essential for innovation.
Using questions for innovation
When organizations are intentionally trying to innovate, they often engage in recombination. Recombination is an integrative question for the purpose of innovation. If you were a teenager in the 1990s, you remember the Reebok Pump, a high-top tennis shoe with an internal pump system. By pumping the shoe’s tongue, an internal bag in the shoe would inflate around your foot, giving you more ankle stability and a snugger fit. Reebok conceived of the shoe in a design meeting that included a team member with a background in medical products. Essentially, he asked, “What would it look like to integrate tennis shoes and a blood pressure cuff?” The result is basketball and 90s fashion history.
You don’t have to have the R&D budget of a conglomerate to try recombination or integrative questions in your leadership. Let me offer a handful of examples to spark your own ideas:
What was your first job as a teenager, and how does it influence how you want to show up in this role?
We often say that organizations are political systems, and we sometimes say that good organizational cultures are like families. How could we pick the best of politics and families and bring it here to work? What are the worst aspects we want to get rid of?
How could our public library be more like Amazon? Or Netflix?
What would it be like if the first day of work felt like an ice cream sundae rather than an average lunch?
Michael Marquardt and Bob Tiede write that great questions have many benefits, including leading to breakthrough thinking and opening the door to great solutions. In other words, great questions are catalysts for innovation. Few types of questions are more effective for this than the integrative question, which invites us to think differently and form new insights through our experience of divergent concepts.