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Some fifteen years ago, in the early days of starting up Fast Company magazine, co-founder Alan Webber shared one of his rules of thumb with me: “A good question beats a good answer.” That pithy wisdom sunk in and took hold immediately.

The first thing you notice when you have your ears pricked for questions is that most people (especially businesspeople) are more interested in presenting solutions, making assertions, and sharing their vision. This isn’t surprising. School programs us to focus on producing the right answer, and the job description of a leader for the last century has basically been “the person with all the answers.”

That’s why it’s so refreshing (and instructive) to spend time with people who lead with questions rather than answers. Why? Why does inquiry beat certainty every time? Here are just three reasons:

1. Questions are a powerful antidote to hubris, which inevitably arises in a culture that celebrates mastery, values decisiveness, and reveres the top guy (or gal). Genuine questions unleash humility, curiosity, even vulnerability. That turns out to be a powerful approach to leadership in a world of expanding complexity, immense challenges and intense change. No single individual can possibly have all of the answers. But an open and curious one can attract more perspectives, surface more possibilities, and enlist more help than one closed off by certitude.

As Vineet Nayar, CEO of the $3.5 billion global IT services firm, HCL Technologies, puts it: “The CEO should be the Chief Question Asker, not the final provider of answers.” He keeps a list of twenty questions and makes time to think about them on a regular (almost daily) basis. He’s asking for trouble when he wonders:

• Should people who create value be governed by people who control it?
• What things do I control that I should not control?
• Could we throw out the entire company rulebook?
• Would my children (or my employees’ children) want to work in a company like mine?
• What would happen if there was no CEO at my company (or at any company in the world)?

He professes not to have the answers, but one thing is certain: the more disruptive the questions, the greater the chance his organization will create the future — rather than be conquered by it.

2. The best questions are the bedrock of all change and creativity.
Those classics — Why? Why not? What if? — invite possibility rather than doubt. They are fundamentally subversive, disruptive, and playful — and they switch people into the mode required to invent anything new. Even better, anyone can ask these questions (anyone who has ever spent time in the company of a three-year-old understands this). You don’t have to hold a position of authority to ask a powerful question, and the people with the most powerful questions stand to make the most impact.

That was certainly true for Jane Harper, who spent a nearly 30-year career at IBM asking the kinds of questions most people don’t want to touch. In 1999, she dared to ask: “Why would really great people — the best technical and managerial talent in the world — want to come work at IBM?” In an era when every young, gifted programmer, engineer, or entrepreneur’s first instinct was to write their own business plan or head to a fast-growing startup, life as a foot soldier in Big Blue’s global army was a pretty hard sell. Harper understood that great people want to work on exciting, high-impact projects, with a small team, in a dynamic setting. So she created exactly that in a Cambridge, Massachusetts lab and launched a wholly original and powerfully effective internship program called Extreme Blue, which has since grown into a thriving platform for innovation and talent development.

3. Asking good questions trades control for contribution. A question asked and explored as a group (whether that group is a team, a company, or a community) generates more solidarity, engagement, and progress than a proclamation from on high. Spend any amount of time with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, whose organization is celebrated for exuding a powerful sense of purpose and passion from every corner, and you’ll hear him repeatedly refer to “the questions we ask ourselves.”

Questions create conversations — and those conversations are how thriving groups think up their future together and stay true to their core. One enduring and powerful question at the heart of Zappos is: “How do we sustain this culture as we grow? How do we stay true to the core and inspire ever more creativity and energy to tackle the future?” That question is actively explored across the organization and even results in a book — the annual Culture Book — which features the “true feelings, thoughts, and opinions of the employees,” who view themselves as vital custodians of that culture.

Of course, there is no one right question, but one of the most productive questions when it comes to engendering a deeply-felt sense of purpose and inspiring the kind of passion that fuels organizations to do extraordinary things is: “What ideas are we fighting for? What do we stand for (and what are we against)? Why does what we do matter?”

The inevitable corollary to that question is: “Are you really who you say you are?” Unless you’re willing to hold a brutally honest and transparent conversation (both inside the organization and beyond) about where you’re living up to your ideas and ideals and where you’re falling down, those values will become meaningless words on the wall.

What’s your question? Share it here and join the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge to share your stories, ideas, and practices about what it takes to make our organizations more inspiring, open and free.

Polly LaBarre is editorial director of the Management Innovation Exchange

What to do when you just don’t fit in at work

Three and a half years ago Forbes merged its dot-com and magazine editorial staffs, and we magazine editors got a dose of culture shock. We were used to coming and going as we pleased. We had few meetings. Especially in the mid- and upper-level ranks, we didn’t socialize together much. Having moved here midway through my career, from a nightly television show where I was by necessity joined at the hip with my colleagues, I loved the independence and freedom of the place.

Now I suddenly had a major adjustment to make. The dot-commers were a much more chummy bunch. Group e-mails whizzed around constantly. Announcements of birthday parties arrived, it seemed, daily. That meant we had to leave our desks at mid-afternoon, crowd into a windowless conference room and sing to some colleague while nibbling on cupcakes and sipping cheap champagne. Call me a curmudgeon, but I detested those forced moments of gaiety and collegiality.

Forbes.com slideshow: When you just don’t fit in at the office

Which leads me to the topic of this column: What do you do when you realize you don’t naturally fit in with your office culture?

My situation was pretty mild. I didn’t want my new colleagues to think I disliked them, so I forced myself to show up at a share of the cupcake fêtes and made a point to offer the birthday boy or girl best wishes, especially if he or she was on my team. I got used to the faster pace of the dot-com schedule, and I attended a lot more meetings. Also, the office culture around here has shifted since then. We’re back to fewer meetings, no birthday parties and more independence.

But for some people the wrong office culture can prove truly onerous or even cost them the job.

Anita Attridge, a career coach in New York, had a client who worked as a vice president for a large pharmaceutical company based in Europe. The woman had to travel overseas once a month for three or four exhausting days at a stretch. Tired and jetlagged, she at first routinely turned down dinner and drinks invitations from her European colleagues, preferring to head back to her hotel and crash. Then she got some bad news: She wasn’t perceived as a strong leader and wasn’t doing her part as a member of the team. “She was startled,” Attridge says. “She had no idea she wasn’t doing well.” It turned out she was expected not only to give her all in the office but also to demonstrate her commitment to her company by socializing with her superiors and colleagues after hours.

“It wasn’t in her comfort zone to do that,” Attridge says. But Attridge advised her to come to terms with the need to socialize: “I said to her that going out to dinners was as much a part of the job as going to meetings. It’s a job requirement that isn’t listed.” Attridge also pointed out that a lot of informal but essential information changes hands at office social functions.

Attridge learned about the importance of office culture firsthand at one of her own first jobs 25 years ago. She was working on the sales staff at Xerox in Rochester, N.Y. She labored hard all day, and she eschewed any form of office socializing – until her manager sat her down and asked if she wanted to have a career at the company. “He said, ‘If you don’t start changing what you’re doing, you’re never going to move ahead.’ He was very explicit.” Attridge started going to lunches and attending going-away parties.

Attridge and other career professionals agree that job seekers should realize that office culture can be as important as workload and duties. “It’s very important to look at the culture before you start the job,” says Sarah Stamboulie, a career coach who had to confront two very different cultures at a crossroads in her own career. She’d gotten two job offers, one from Morgan Stanley and the other at a Japanese insurance company where the atmosphere was formal and buttoned down. If she took the insurance job, she says, “I realized that sooner or later I’d say the wrong thing.” She went with Morgan Stanley.

Sometimes an office’s culture can be so dysfunctional you can find it impossible to do your job. Pam Lassiter, a consultant in Boston and author of “The New Job Security: The 5 Best Strategies for Taking Control of Your Career,” had a client who worked in business development at a three-year-old energy technology company. The company’s chief executive, terrified that competitors would steal his ideas, fostered an office culture corroded by fear, distrust and secrecy. Lassiter’s client, who was outgoing and enthusiastic, felt so stymied that he quit after a year to start his own energy financing venture. Says Lassiter, “If the CEO isn’t going to change anytime soon and your values or ways of working are different, then you should be developing an exit plan.”

Culture can also make a difference where you least expect it, Lassiter points out. One of her clients started a mobile phone marketing business from home. She got herself plenty of business and a robust income but also grew lonely. Says Lassiter, “She didn’t realize how much she enjoyed the camaraderie of teams, the comfort of the water cooler and the pleasure of informal chitchat with the same people.” The client set up arrangements with clients that had her spending extended periods in office settings where she realized she was much happier.

More from Forbes.com

• 7 simple ways to be greener at work
• How to succeed at office romance
• 14 things you should do at the end of every work day
• Interview body language mistakes that can cost you the job

© 2012 Forbes.com