Questions Are the Answer: A Creative Approach to AI-Enhanced Inquiry, Insight, and Impact

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we work, make decisions, and solve problems. But with an abundance of AI-generated answers, the real challenge is ensuring that we ask the right questions. The key to navigating this new landscape isn’t just access to AI-powered insights—it’s knowing how to ask better questions with AI to drive transformational results.

This course builds on frameworks from Hal Gregersen's book, Questions Are the Answer, incorporating insights from over 200 global leaders. Through hands-on methods, you'll learn to apply catalytic questioning—now augmented by AI—to leadership, decision-making, and innovation. 

This highly interactive experience teaches executives how to cultivate powerful inquisitive leadership practices that fuel breakthroughs in a rapidly changing world. Through AI-enhanced questioning methods, participants will learn how to frame, refine, and expand their inquiries–and impacts–in ways that AI alone cannot replicate.

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem just by changing the question?

Talk to the world’s most creative problem-solvers, and they will often tell you that asking the right questions led them to their biggest breakthroughs.

• Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, reshaped computing’s future when he asked; What if GPU computing could accelerate every industry, not just gaming?
• Leena Nair, CEO of Chanel and former Chief Human Resources Officer at Unilever, continually transforms corporate norms by asking: How can we bring more humanity and purpose into every aspect of business?
• Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, accelerates AI progress by wondering: If we can figure out how human intelligence works through AI, how can we use that knowledge to solve the world’s most pressing problems?

Each leader unlocked transformative impact by questioning assumptions that others took for granted.

Great questions have a catalytic quality—they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. This skill is essential today, as digitization and disruption push leaders to the edge of uncertainty and often forces them to recognize what they don’t know they don’t know—before it’s too late.

While AI alone cannot surface the unknown unknowns, it can be a critical partner. This course trains executives to engage with AI to refine, expand, and challenge their thinking, ensuring they ask the game-changing questions that uncover hidden threats and opportunities.

The course also addresses the organizational and psychological barriers to questioning—examining why leaders and teams often avoid hard questions and how to reverse that pattern. AI can help counteract cognitive biases, surface fresh perspectives, and enable a culture where curiosity thrives.

Five Essential Tools for Mastering Catalytic Inquiry

• Question Conditions: Assess how often you put yourself in situations where you’re wrong, uncomfortable, and reflectively quiet—key conditions for generating breakthrough questions.
• Question Journey: Map how your questioning habits have evolved over time, revealing patterns that shape your ability to challenge assumptions.
• Question Audit: Conduct a 24-hour self-assessment of questions asked, received, and reflected upon—highlighting opportunities to deepen inquiry and uncover blind spots.
• Question Burst: Apply this proven method (used by 40,000+ leaders) to challenge false assumptions and unlock fresh insights through a structured, high-energy process. 
• Question Culture: Learn to embed catalytic questioning into teams and organizations by modeling inquiry, enabling fearless questions, and fostering psychologically safety.

With each of these tools, AI can play a supporting role, helping to counteract cognitive biases, surfacing unexpected patterns, and challenging conventional wisdom. While AI can enhance inquiry by revealing fresh perspectives, participants will learn how to keep human curiosity at the center—ensuring technology serves as an amplifier of catalytic questions, not a replacement for them.

AI enhances each tool by helping to counteract cognitive biases, surface unexpected patterns, and challenge conventional wisdom. While AI provides fresh perspectives, human curiosity remains central—ensuring technology amplifies rather than replaces a human first approach to catalytic inquiry.

As a participant in this course, you will learn:

• How to create the unique conditions for catalytic questioning that drive radical shifts in beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes.
• How to identify what you don’t know you don’t know, tackling leadership blind spots with precision.
• How to engage productively with discomfort, using inquiry to drive transformation amidst uncertainty.
• How to apply the power of the pause, leveraging intentional reflection to sharpen insights and ensure the right questions are guiding strategic action.
• How to partner with AI to deepen human inquiry, insight, and impact, ensuring technology is an accelerator—not a replacement—for curiosity and critical thinking.
• How to embed catalytic questioning into your team and organization, crafting an enterprise-wide culture of inquiry.
• How to acquire more questioning capital—the ability to identify catalytic questions and see them through to positive impact

Come prepared to tackle a real challenge you face and leave equipped to ask the transformative questions that drive meaningful progress at work and beyond.

Upon successful completion of your course, you will earn a certificate of completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management. This course may also count toward MIT Sloan Executive Certificate requirements.

The course blends research-backed methodologies, hands-on exercises, and AI-enhanced inquiry practices to help you:

• Harness AI as a co-questioner, not just an answer provider, while keeping human curiosity at the center of decision-making.
• Use AI to enhance, not replace, human curiosity so that technology expands inquiry rather than narrows possibilities.
• Uncover hidden assumptions by recognizing how human and AI biases shape the way you frame and interpret questions.
• Reflect on your Question Journey, learning how questioning habits have been shaped and how to can transform them into greater impact.
• Conduct a 24-hour Question Audit to identify growth opportunities in your approach to being an inquiry-driven leader.
• Generate fresh solutions using AI-enhanced Question Burst method as individuals and teams. 
• Strengthen your capacity to embrace uncertainty and discomfort when faced with a foggy future.
• Master the "Power of the Pause" to surface deeper insights instead of rushing to easy answers and instant action.
• Develop strategies for creating a robust Question Culture, embedding catalytic inquiry deeply into organizational routines and team interactions.

Participants workshop real-world challenges, gaining practical questioning frameworks and tools to unlock creativity, improve decision-making, and lead confidently in an AI-driven world.

Please Note:

We do not recommend this course if you have already completed Inquiry-Driven Leadership, unless you are seeking a refresher of the content.

This course was previously called Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Creative Problem Solving, Innovation, and Change.