Questions Are the Answer: A Creative Approach to AI-Enhanced Inquiry, Insight, and Impact
MIT Sloan School of Management
Organizations & Leadership
+1
About Programme
Why attend Questions Are the Answer?
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.
Course Topics
Programme Content
Day 1
8:00 AM – 8:45 AM
Registration, Breakfast and Introduction to the Program
8:45 AM – 9:30 AM
Questions Really Are the Answer in a Rapidly Changing World
9:30 AM – 10:25 AM
Tool #1: Creating Conditions for Catalytic Questions (w/ break)
10:25 AM – 12:00 PM
Tool #2: Conducting Question Audits
12:00 PM – 12:45 PM
Lunch
12:45 PM – 2:40 PM
Tool #3: Mapping Question Journeys (w/ break)
2:40 PM – 4:15 PM
Tool #4: Doing Question Bursts
4:15 PM – 6:00 PM
What Questions, Insights, and Actions Surfaced During Day 1? (w/ Reception)
Day 2
8:00 AM – 9:00 AM
What Questions, Insights, and Actions Surfaced Overnight?
Taking the Toolkit Forward in Your Organization (w/ break)
3:50 PM – 4:05 PM
Executive Certificate Ceremony
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Committing to the Quest of Inquiry-Driven Leadership
Day 1
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Who are We and How Can We Create a Culture of Inquiry? / Why Do Questions Matter More Than Answers? / Why Don’t We Ask More Questions?
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Lunch (optional 30-minute networking lunch in breakout rooms from 12:30PM – 1:00PM)
1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
What If We Brainstormed for Questions? / What Are the Key Conditions for Creating Catalytic Questions? / How Can We Create Those Conditions for Ourselves and Others?
Day 2
9:00 AM – 12:00 PM
What Questions, Insights, and Actions Surfaced from Day 1? / How Do We Become Questioning Catalysts to Create Transformational Change? / How Do We Create a Psychologically Safe Space for Fearless Questions to Flourish?
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Lunch (optional 30-minute networking lunch in breakout rooms from 12:30PM – 1:00PM)
12:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Why Not Aim for the Biggest Questions? / How Can We Become Instruments of Inquiry to Promote Positive Change at Work and in Life? / Commit to the Quest as Inquiry-driven Leaders
Programme Objective
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.
Programme Audience
This program is designed for individuals seeking to:
Solve big challenges
Lead positive change and disruption
Create a culture of inquiry and creative problem solving in their teams and organization
The course content is applicable to professionals in any role and in any industry, but has been designed with senior managers and executives in mind. If you're ready to make progress on a real challenge you face, confront your potential blind spots as a leader, and practice truly catalytic questioning—all among a diverse group of peers from around the world—then this course is for you.
Prior to the first day of sessions, participants are expected to complete pre-work about their questioning practices that will better prepare them for the learning experience.
"This course was way beyond my expectations. I registered to get training and insight into leadership skills, but I left with a deep understanding of my needs, leadership style, fears, weaknesses, and strengths. This course truly challenged me to reflect, and I strongly recommend it to anyone in leadership or pursuing leadership positions."
"As someone who is mid-career in a leadership role and desperately needed a reset in my "thinking way" this class was perfect. I would recommend it to anyone who feels stuck. The principles learned in Questions are the Answer are just as applicable in your personal life as they are in your professional life."
"Outstanding material and presenters, really made you think differently and challenge assumptions. Immediately applied some of it as soon as I got back in office. My fifth MIT course and easily the best."
Breaking Down Barriers with Questions
During this webinar, MIT Sloan faculty and innovation expert Hal Gregersen is joined by Executive Certificate holder Peter Åberg to discuss how the frameworks in Questions Are the Answer can have inspiring outcomes.
Programme Benefits
Innovation
Master deeply inquisitive leadership skills that spark breakthrough results in an era of rapid change
Leverage AI
Learn to leverage AI to enhance, not replace, human inquiry, unlocking higher-impact questions and deeper insights
Inquiry-Driven Discussions
Engage in dynamic discussions drawing from 200+ research interviews with inquiry-driven leaders across the world
Mens et Manus
Workshop real challenges with research-based insights and AI-enhanced methods to make greater individual, team, and organizational impacts
Certificate
Earn a certificate of course completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management
Testimonials
"This course was way beyond my expectations. I registered to get training and insight into leadership skills, but I left with a deep understanding of my needs, leadership style, fears, weaknesses, and strengths. This course truly challenged me to reflect, and I strongly recommend it to anyone in leadership or pursuing leadership positions."
Shahrzad A
"Two days of full immersion course where I feel to be guided outside the normal way to analyse problems. Gathering approaches from top Leaders from all around the world compressed in simple tools to be applied on daily basis not only at work but in all situation where we need to go outside from uncomfortable situation or to solve complex problems. The great value added has been the live interactions with large part of the class, and of course with Hal Gregersen and Marsha Dunn with her incredible ability to summarize contents drawing pictures."
Tiziana N
"I suggest you put in contact participant in group of 2 or 3, in advance, as part of the pre work, choosing them based on experience, age, field of interest, or other. Ask them to do the exercise we perform in class, so they have a little training to leverage the lessons. Not all of them are willing to do that, but the ones that are, they will take full advantage of the great potential in this great course."
Corrado T
"I had been struggling with a few challenges in my role...nothing catastrophic, but I felt as if I was just living with those challenges rather than thinking about novel solutions. Hal's class was exactly what I needed to clear my mind and give me hope. The engaging classroom environment, the substance of the material presented, the takeaways, and even the great food made for an experience that will certainly bring me back for another course. As someone who is mid-career in a leadership role and desperately needed a reset in my thinking way this class was perfect. I would recommend it to anyone who feels stuck. The principles learned in Questions are the Answer are just as applicable in your personal life as they are in your professional life."
Aaron W
"This well-designed course encourages self-reflection both professionally and personally. It significantly shifts your perspective on problems and solutions that were previously hidden from view. Meeting the dedicated facilitators and fellow participants was both a great honor and pleasure."
Richard K
"The program was very informative and helpful in life and in work. Hal was outstanding! Many thanks to Jaclyn for her help."
Rowida A
"Outstanding material and presenters, really made you think differently and challenge assumptions. Immediately applied some of it as soon as I got back in office. My fifth MIT course and easily the best."
Mike R
"An amazing training course, that was highly interactive. I learned so much."
Lamya H
"I have encountered a tough issue that I do not believe either me or my organization can resolve. The night after the first day class, I asked myself why not try what I had learned during the day. It was not easy to configure responses by experimenting the new ways, such as using prescriptive questions and other techniques, I was able to create the new answer. The moment I finished it, I knew it would work and IT DID! I am so grateful for what the Questions are the Answer course has to offer to me!"
Heather Z
"If you are in Tehcnology or from the Business Side, we all use questions to drive information and requirments. This course provides methodlolgies and structured ways of using questions and receiving questions that make impact beyond the standard discovery questions we all use. Hal wrote in my copy of his boo Stay as courious as you are. For me and my work, questions are a way of life. This program has given me a way to organize the chaos and dive deeper than ever before."
