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July 10 - August 11, 2019
Often, what seems to be the right question in one context proves to be the wrong one in another.
Contextual inquiry is about asking questions up close and in context, relying on observation, listening, and empathy to guide us toward a more intelligent, and therefore more effective, question.
To understand how people live, you have to immerse yourself in their lives—watch
Listening informs questioning.
Paul Bennett says that one of the keys to being a good questioner is to stop reflexively asking so many thoughtless questions and pay attention—eventually, a truly interesting question may come to mind.
When you’re anxious, he learned later in his professional research, your brain tends to be less creative and imaginative. “You want to attend to the outside world, not the inside,” he said. “And you’re trying to get to answers that are the simplest. But when you’re relaxed, you go the other way—you’re able to go to the inside world.” In the more relaxed state, neural networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.
it’s important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away.
If you’re looking to take a break and simultaneously stimulate connective inquiry, a visit to the museum might be just the ticket. It engages the imagination, yet leaves room for thinking; it offers up as inspiration the many creative connections and smart recombinations that others have produced in the past; and it exposes the visitor to so many ideas and influences that it provides abundant raw material for making new mental connections.
be willing to slow down, go quiet, and let the question incubate.
divergent thinking—which calls for trying to generate a wide range of ideas, including offbeat ones, in the early stages of creative problem solving.
force your brain off those predictable paths by purposely “thinking wrong”—coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense, mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together.
when you force yourself to confront contrary thoughts or upside-down ideas, you “jiggle the synapses” in the brain,51
In so doing, you may loosen some of the old, stale neural connections and make it easier to form new ones.
Idea Generator app
Bob Sutton says that67 when analyzing a misstep, in addition to asking what went wrong, you should also ask, In this failure, what went right? (Conversely, when you try out something and it seems to have succeeded, look for what went wrong or could have been better, Sutton says. The best learning comes from looking at successes and failures side by side.)
resources exist to aid in tackling almost any problem, and that people will help if you just ask
As you look for potential collaborators, aim for people with backgrounds, cultural experiences, and skill sets that differ from your own: diversity fuels creativity.
Not Impossible Labs, designed to help innovators connect with each other and find great problems to work on together.
Web
if you’re willing to lay out something in public that you care about, people will be interested in participating. And they’re capable of remarkable things.”
The old, closed questions (How many? How much? How fast?) still matter on a practical level, but increasingly businesses must tackle more sophisticated open questions (Why? What if? How?) to thrive in an environment that demands a clearer sense of purpose, a vision for the future, and an appetite for change.
Figuring out the questions that are most critical for a particular company to consider, given current challenges and market conditions, may be the first order of business.
a good place to start is at the most fundamental level—with questions of purpose. Why are we in business? (And by the way—what business are we really in?)
looking back to when the business was founded and asking, What was that higher purpose at the outset? And how can we rally people around that today?
Whom must we fearlessly become? That can be a difficult challenge, he says, because it requires “envisioning a version of the company that does not exist yet.”
increasingly been finding success by moving outside their primary area of expertise.
whatever a company’s specialty product or service might be—whatever got you to where you are today—might not be the thing that gets you to the next level.
It’s a sobering realization for many businesses: They can’t rest on what they’ve already done, or what they know. The need to bring a “beginner’s mind” to business may make it necessary to—if only temporarily—set aside all history, and all notions of what has worked in the past, in order to ask questions from a fresh perspective.
If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do?
What if the company didn’t exist?
Who would miss us? The answer to that can help clarify who your most important customers are and what your real purpose is.)
should ask regularly is What should we stop doing?
“it lessens your chances of being successful at what you want to do next—because you’ll be sucking up resources doing what’s no longer needed and taking those resources away from what should be a top priority.” Moreover, if you can’t figure out what you should stop doing, it might be an early warning sign that you don’t know what your strategy is.
use What If hypothetical questioning to temporarily remove practical constraints.
encourage teams working on projects to ask themselves, What if money were no object? How might we approach the project differently?
What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?
challenging people to think about creating or achieving something within extreme limits—What if we could only charge ten bucks for our hundred-dollar service?—it forces a rethinking of real-world practicalities and assumptions.
What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide?
when you opt for the cause over the bottom line, employees can see that, and then they believe in the company and the cause even more.”
“Most companies are full of ideas, but they don’t know how to go about finding out if those ideas work,” Ries says. “If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow employees to experiment more—so they can find out the answers to their questions themselves.”
important for companies to give people a safe place to test ideas and run experiments.
Company leadership needs to “provide permission and protocols for experimentation,” he says.
providing the time and resources for people to explore new questions, as well as establishing methods: “How might we?” questioning sessions, ethnography, in-market experimentation.
cordoning off this area of the business—although a clear line of visibility should remain between the core business and the “petri dish” part of the comp...
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They get built for execution, and once they’re having success, they’ll very quickly start thinking, ‘We’ve got to stick to our knitting.’” All of which means they’ve outgrown their original petri dish—and might need a new one.
A brainstorming session runs counter to that: Everyone is stuck in a room trying desperately to come up with original ideas. “There is too much pressure and23 too much influence from others in the group,”
shift the nature of brainstorming so that it’s about generating questions instead of ideas.
Answers tend to be judged more harshly than questions.
When people in a group are struggling with an issue and find “they’re getting nowhere, they’re stuck,” Gregersen says, “that’s the perfect point to step back and do question-storming.”
“At around twenty-five questions, the group may stall briefly and say, ‘That’s enough questions.’ But if you push on beyond that point, some of the best questions come as you get to fifty or even seventy-five.”
people, make them want to work more on those. RQI recommends coming out of a session with three great questions that you want to explore further.
