More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
One of the best ways to overcome this is to try to close the distance between the questioner and the problem. 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.
instead of doing a snazzy PowerPoint presentation, showed them a long, deadly dull video of a hospital ceiling.
How do i bring the experience to life for stakeholders?
“listening with your whole body”—using all senses to absorb what’s going on around you.
“In order for imagination to flourish,37 there must be an opportunity to see things as other than they currently are or appear to be. This begins with a simple question: What if? It is a process of introducing something strange and perhaps even demonstrably untrue into our current situation or perspective.”
What If questions—often involves the ability to combine ideas and influences, to mix and remix things that might not ordinarily go together. Einstein and others have referred to this as “combinatorial thinking”; in this book, I’ve been using the term connective inquiry to focus on the questioning aspect. Whatever one calls it, this mix-and-match mental process is at the root of creativity and innovation.
Smart recombinations
“The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas.” Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who “defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.” They did it, Murray says, by combining things that didn’t seem to go together and by borrowing ideas “from faraway places.”
begin to think analogously: What if this amusement park could be like a movie, brought to life? “In doing this,” Murray explains, “Disney takes his original subject, an amusement park, and lays a metaphor on top of it and begins to see the whole thing through that ‘movie’ metaphor—so
To forge those illogical connections, Murray advises, “You must quiet the logical mind.”
thinking of the brain as a forest full of trees.
big insights that can solve problems or come up with highly creative new ideas, often involve those remote connections that happen in the right hemisphere.
If your conscious mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious mind will go to work on it.
providing “a plethora of raw materials to be connected,” as Zhong puts it. In particular, if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you’ve been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.
the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections.
He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work.
sleeping can help people to perform better at solving difficult problems requiring a creative solution. (McNerney quoted an old John Steinbeck line: “A difficult problem at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”) Similar research exists on daydreaming and its value in producing original, creative ideas. And everyone knows about the clichéd (but only because it’s true) idea-in-the-shower moment. The same neurological forces seem to be at work in all of these instances. The sleeping or relaxed brain cuts off distractions and turns inward, as the right
...more
tinkering or doodling can also induce an inattention that is conducive to having insights. “And it’s possible you may get different results depending on which hand you doodle with,” Kounios says. “Using the left hand may stimulate the brain’s right hemisphere.”
when you take on a challenging question, if you spend time with that question, your mind will keep working on it.
One way is by purposely trying to “think wrong.”
“thinking wrong”—coming up with ideas that seem to make no sense, mixing and matching things that don’t normally go together.
you may loosen some of the old, stale neural connections and make it easier to form new ones.
encourages participants to come up with ideas for things that don’t work—an oven that can’t cook, a car that doesn’t move. It sounds crazy, but when you do the exercise, interesting things can emerge; you come up with offbeat, alternate uses for the oven or the car.
train the mind to think differently when confronted with a problem or a challenge—to consider a wide range of possibilities,
strengthen the What If muscle.
What If questions can be used to “invert” reality. If the current reality is that restaurants provide people with a menu upon arrival, the inverse hypothesis is What if a restaurant provided customers with a menu only when they leave? Williams has worked with clients who have used hypothetical questioning to challenge the most basic assumptions about customer behavior.
“The important thing about telling everyone58 your idea is that it puts you on the hook for following through, because you’re going to look foolish if you do nothing,”
“A prototype is a question, embodied.”
That tendency toward overthinking and excessively preparing, rather than quickly trying out ideas to get feedback and to see what works and doesn’t, is a behavior that becomes ingrained over time.
The kids used their time much more efficiently by constructing right away. They tried one way of building, and if it didn’t work, they quickly tried another. They got in a lot more tries. They learned from their mistakes as they went along, instead of attempting to figure out everything in advance.
What we learn from those kids is that there’s no substitute for quickly trying things out to see what works.
just prototype something and see what works.”
The basic principles of the test-and-learn approach apply in almost any situation where people are trying to solve problems in dynamic, uncertain conditions.
“The trick is to go from one failure65 to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.”
hold it to the light and inquire, Why did the idea or effort fail? What if I could take what I’ve learned from this failure and try a revised approach? How might I do that?
In this failure, what went right?
As you look for potential collaborators, aim for people with backgrounds, cultural experiences, and skill sets that differ from your own: diversity fuels creativity.
tapped into the “global brain”
ask themselves every day: “If not now, then when? If not me, then who?”)
Reaching out to potential collaborators can require a leap of faith
Will the idea still be “mine” if I share it? Why would anyone care enough to actually help? If I’m used to coming up with ideas alone, will I be able to do so working with others?
collaborative inquiry
“As a composer I love the act of imagining a question—and even a whole world—and being able to make it real in your mind over a long period, before you share it with others.”
question: How might we turn music into a more participatory experience? It springs from his sense that most people have become passive consumers of music—“it’s everywhere, on everyone’s headphones, but fewer people are studying music, making it, or participating in the full experience of music,”
Sharing a question with others is akin to issuing a challenge that a certain type of curious-minded person may find hard to resist.
hoarding your beautiful questions—is usually pointless because it’s hard to make headway on something hidden in a drawer.
The notion of a need to keep moving ideas forward, to keep pursuing new opportunities and responding to change by way of constant, cyclical questioning is particularly relevant in today’s dynamic business environment, where companies find that “answers” are transitory and increasingly short-lived.
Just thinking of it that way made me look in different places.”
the real potential for breakthrough innovation was at the low end of the market—this
the era of “small-minded questions” is ending. “Company leaders are realizing that if they’re only asking the small questions, it’s not going to advance their agenda, their position, or their brands. In order to innovate now, they have to ask more expansive questions.”
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.
