Sitting with unanswered questions

When observing the processes that drive his exploration, Alexander Obenauer mentions many things, but what stood out most for me is his ability to sit for long times with unanswered questions:

A bias towards divergence can be hard to hold. People often have a natural inclination to converge new thinking and ideas as soon as they pop up; to settle them, relate them to previously settled ideas (and by doing so, declare these new ones also settled), or to make them immediately fit into one storyline that coheres all the related thinking, discarding anything that doesn’t immediately fit.

There’s a real power in sitting with a diverse, expanding corpus of conflicting ideas and thinking, and letting the ideas show the way forward.

Some people have a particularly hard time sitting with unanswered questions. They will interpret curiosity as ignorance, and optimism as naivety. They hold their convictions strongly, and when faced with someone who holds their curiosity strongly, they will argue — and win. That doesn’t mean they’re right. It often only means they care more about the answers than questions.

One tip in particular he gave was new for me: give at least two solutions to a problem you pose (zero and people question the question, one and people critique the solution. With two, people compare and contrast, which often leads to higher-level thought and divergence).