Welcome
Pia Lauritzen is a philosopher, writer and keynote speaker, asking the big questions about tech and transformation.
“People are still talking about Pia's keynote in the hallways. She simply hit the spot!”
Josephine Müller, Head of Intelligent Automation
Keynote speaker
Pia speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. Combining her experience as a philosopher, tech founder, and executive advisor, she shares what she learned from collecting and analyzing more than 30,000 questions across hundreds of companies and communities.
Writer
Pia has authored 5 books on the nature and impact of questions, focusing on culture, technology, and leadership. Her 2024 book, Questions, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press. She writes a regular column for Forbes, asking the big questions about tech and transformation.
Philosopher
Pia has a PhD in philosophy from Aarhus University, Denmark. Her post doctoral studies of how people from different language cultures use questions to distribute responsibility put her on Thinkers50’s Radar list — “spotlighting thinkers with the ideas most likely to shape the future”.
Latest news from Pia
Pia’s life with questions
In her 2019 TEDx Talk, "What you don't know about questions," Pia shares how her lifelong strategy of simply asking when there was something she wanted to know no longer worked when her son became a teenager.
No matter what she asked him, she just got a "hmm" back, and she realized it was time to take a closer look at the questions, she and others ask.
What she found changed not only her relationship with her son, but also with everyone else. And it became the first step in what she now calls her mission to democratize the power of questions.
Pia’s academic research into questions
Late 90s. Pia’s quest to understand and unleash the power of questions started while she was a philosophy student at University of Copenhagen.
2008. Pia published her first academic book, Et spørgsmål om at være (A Question Of Being), where she laid the foundation for her unique philosophical, question-driven approach to culture, technology, and leadership.
2011. In her second book, Filosofi i ledelse (Philosophy in Leadership), Pia shared key findings from her PhD, combining her philosophical research with her experience as a leadership and communication consultant.
During her PhD studies, she invented Qvest, which enabled her to collect and analyze tens of thousands of questions across countries, companies and communities. The question data revealed some interesting patterns in how people understand and use questions.
2014. The Carlsberg Foundation granted Pia a post doctoral fellowship to study the nature and impact of questions in different language cultures — more specifically, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Danish.
2024. Pia shares her findings in her 2017 academic book, Questions: Between Identity And Difference (Aarhus University Press) and in her 2024 popular science book, Questions, which is part of the 'Brief Books About Big Ideas' series from Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thinkers50: Powerful proof that questions will shape our future
““The world of management ideas used to be filled with silver bullets and neatly packaged answers to all known organisational and leadership challenges. Things have changed. Pia Lauritzen is one of the thinkers leading our collective understanding of the new world order. Her work on questioning provides practical tools for business leaders and also important new perspectives built on her understanding of philosophy. Pia provides powerful proof that questions, rather than generic answers, will shape our futures.””
