Is the question more important than the answer?

Right now I have 4 books I am shifting time between, one of them is "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci" by Michael J Gelb. One of the items brought by my Gelb is curiosity as one of his seven steps to thinking like da Vinci. In essence this particular step is all about asking questions. It is an interesting thing that as we grow and are educated we are thought to not question but rather to answer.

Gelb states, "In most cases, schooling does not develop curiosity, delight in ambiguity, and question asking skill. Rather the thinking that is rewarded is figuring out the "right answer" - that is, the answer held by the person in authority, the teacher."

In school we learned that the answer was more important than the question. Not just that, but that the answer that is desired by the prevailing powers that be is the answer we want to give. If we don't then we don't get good grades, if we don't get good grades we don't have as many options, if we don't have options we can't make as much money, if we can't make as much money then we can't have as good of a life... or something along those lines. People get caught up in trying to give the answer that their boss want's to hear. Or not asking the questions that they feel should be answered simply because that is how they have been trained, or that is the prevailing culture of the company.

What get's lost in the shuffle is the desire to question. The Wonder of the Universe. We all think of small children and asking why. For those that are not parents kids don't ask the questions you expect. Sure they ask why the sky is blue... but they also ask if everyone sees the same colors, how the sunlight travels if it doesn't have a car, and random things that simply don't make sense to the educated and it would never even have occurred to us to ask.

As I think about Engineering I think that this curiosity and desire to ask questions of what if and how and why are key to a successful engineering approach. In order to build effective systems we need to understand how things operate, what happens when something outside of the expected happens, how the system will respond to it, etc.

From these questions we come up with what we are calling Operational Models that show the threads, the Pressure Points, the potential hot areas of any application. From this we can plan capacity, plan protection and plan impact to downline and upline systems.

So, here is an exercise for you. (Borrowed freely from Gelb) Take a piece of paper (da Vinci. always kept a notebook or note pages with him, now called the Codex Arundel. Bill Gates paid 30 million dollars for some of them, the Codex Leicester... who knows, if you keep one maybe it will be worth millions some day) and write 100 questions on it. They can be about anything. Just let your mind wander. Then look for themes. Then explore those themes.