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What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem--in your workplace, community, or home life--just by changing the question?Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: ""why are all the great building toys made for boys?"" Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: ""would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?"" Or listen to technologist Elon Musk, who routinely challenges assumptions with questions like: ""What are people accepting as an industry standard when there's room for significant improvement?""Great questions like these have a catalytic quality--that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways.