When I run workshops with educators and students, I often start with the following exercise: Hold up a pencil. Just a regular pencil. Now, how many questions can you come up with about this pencil in five minutes?

At first, people look at me like I’m joking. It’s a pencil. What’s to question?

But then someone raises their hand. “What’s it made of?” Then another person. “Why is it that shape?” Another. “Why does it have an eraser?” And suddenly the floodgates open. “Why is the eraser pink?” “How does the graphite get inside the wood?”

In five minutes, a room of educators comes up with dozens and dozens of questions about something they’ve held in their hands a thousand times and never actually questioned.

By the end, people are laughing at how much they didn’t know about something so simple. And here’s what they realize: they weren’t asking questions because they’d stopped seeing the pencil. They’d made it invisible because it was so familiar.

This is the third action from The Future Creative: Ask Questions.

Asking questions sounds simple. We all ask questions every day. But there’s a difference between asking questions to get information and asking questions to explore possibilities.

Asking Questions, as an action, is the practice of shifting from questions that have a single right answer to questions that open up new thinking. It’s moving from “how do I use this pencil?” to “what could a pencil be if it were different?” From “how does it work?” to “why does it work this way?” From accepting what is to imagining what could be.

When you ask real questions, you stop being a passive consumer of the world and you start being an explorer of it. And that’s where creativity lives.

Here’s what I’ve noticed inside classrooms of all ages: we ask a lot of questions, but most of them are questions we already know the answer to. We ask these questions to check if students are paying attention or if they have understood the material. And that definitely has its place. But it closes things down and it can narrow our thinking.

Authentic questions open things up. Authentic questions say, “I don’t know, and I’m curious.” And here’s something we discovered while writing the book. Of all ten actions, asking questions was the one that came up most often in our interviews with creativity experts, educators, and researchers. Again and again, they told us that asking questions sits at the very heart of creativity. As creativity practitioner Anne Jacoby told us, curiosity is the gateway to creativity.

There’s also something really timely about this. As artificial intelligence changes how we access information, simply knowing things matters a little less than it used to. What matters more is the ability to ask new and better questions. Questions about the content, about the source, and even about ourselves.

But here’s the challenge. We’re often trained out of asking questions. We learn that we’re supposed to have the answers, not ask them. And for many students, asking a question feels risky and vulnerable. It can feel like admitting you don’t understand. Some students have even experienced what is called question-shaming, where a classmate laughs or says “that’s a stupid question.” Those small moments can shut curiosity down fast.

So when we make space for questions, when we treat them as valued rather than as interruptions, we send a powerful message: curiosity is welcome here. And that’s the kind of classroom where creativity can actually grow.
THE HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
So here’s what I want you to do this week. Try the pencil exercise. Take a pencil and set a timer for five minutes. And ask questions. As many as you can. Don’t answer them. Just ask.

Once you have tried this activity, take some time to think about other things you might ask questions about. For example, perhaps you ask questions about a lesson you teach. Why do you teach it that way? What if you changed the order? What if students experienced it differently? Or maybe you ask questions about a classroom routine that you do every single day without thinking. Why do you line up that way? Why do you take attendance first thing? What would happen if you didn’t?

Maybe you ask questions about a problem a student is having. Instead of jumping to solutions, what are all the things you could ask? What’s really going on? What does the student need? What have you not considered?

The point is this: asking questions isn’t just something you do with a pencil in a workshop. It’s a way of being curious about everything. It’s what happens when you stop accepting things the way they are and start imagining how they could be different.

In The Future Creative, we go much deeper into how to ask questions in ways that actually shift thinking. We share one of my favorite techniques, which is framing problems as questions. Instead of a student saying “I’m bad at math,” they learn to ask “how might I figure out what I need to strengthen in math?” That one small shift opens the door to solutions that weren’t visible before. And we get into how to build a classroom culture where asking questions feels safe, where curiosity is valued more than having the right answer.

So this week go out and practice asking questions. Let yourself see it as you’ve never seen it before. And notice what happens when you do. Notice how it changes the way you see not just the pencil, but everything around you.