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There are different ways of thinking about purpose. A furniture retailer might choose to think its purpose is to sell people furniture. But it could also approach the business in a very different way. Its higher purpose might be that the company brings a sense of style into the lives of those on a budget; or that it enables people to express their creativity through home furnishings.
Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do?
What if the company didn’t exist? That question allows you to take a clean-slate approach in thinking about the industry and your place in it.
brainstormed as if they were launching a Silicon Valley startup whose mission was to attack the magazine, asking: What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves? Answer: they’d launch an assault on the digital front.
forces a rethinking of real-world practicalities and assumptions.
sought to find a more meaningful role in communities, it looked for a problem that matched up well with its capabilities and resources.
What does the world need most . . . that we are uniquely able to provide?
anytime you’re doing something new “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.”
you start with the acknowledgment that “we are operating amid all this uncertainty—and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking What will we do? or What will we build? the emphasis should be on What will we learn? “And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing—the minimum viable product—that can get you the learning,”
don’t just focus on the mercenary question Will consumers pay for this? The startup business coach Dave Kashen thinks the better question to ask about any new venture is, Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better?
Collaborative thinking in problem solving is essential because it brings together multiple viewpoints and diverse backgrounds.
While it’s understood that creativity sometimes requires solitude (“Be alone, that is when ideas are born,” Nikola Tesla said), we also know that it flourishes when diverse ideas and thoughts are exchanged.
shift the nature of brainstorming so that it’s about generating questions instead of ideas.
some of the peer pressure in conventional brainstorming is lessened in this format. Answers tend to be judged more harshly than questions.
“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.”
It can be easier to winnow down questions because the best questions are magnetic—they intrigue people, make them want to work more on those.
But as soon as you start using words like can and should, you’re implying judgment: Can we really do it? And should we?” By substituting the word might, he says, “You’re able to defer judgment, which helps people to create options more freely and opens up more possibilities.”
How might we? Brown observes that within the phrase, each of those three words plays a role in spurring creative problem solving: “The how part assumes there are solutions out there—it provides creative confidence. Might says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not—either way, it’s okay. And the we part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”
HMW proponents say this form of questioning can be applied to almost any challenge—though it works best with ones that are ambitious yet also achievable. Brown says it doesn’t work as well with problems that are too broad (How might we solve world hunger?) or too narrow (How might we increase profits by 5 percent next quarter?). Figuring out the right HMW questions to ask is a process, Brown says; “You need to find the sweet spot.”
“The most important thing business leaders must do today is to be the ‘chief question-asker’ for their organization,” says the consultant Dev Patnaik of Jump Associates. However, Patnaik adds a cautionary note: “The first thing most leaders need to realize is, they’re really bad at asking questions.”
an outsider looking at your business will probably never understand it as well as you do. Hence, that outsider generally shouldn’t be telling you what to do. He/she should be helping you to see things from a different angle, challenge your own assumptions, reframe old problems, and ask better questions—so that, in the end, you can figure out the solutions yourself.
The most effective questioning leader won’t just give answers to others (or demand answers from them via interrogation); the better approach is to use Socratic-style questioning to encourage deeper and more creative thinking by others.
“Questioning is critical, but at some point you have to take action when you think you’ve found the best path.” How do you know when to stop inquiring and start doing? “I feel it mostly in my gut,”
(replacing, for example, We make the world a better place through robotics! with How might we make the world a better place through robotics?).
a mission question invites participation and collaboration.
questions, by their very nature, challenge people and invite them to engage with an idea or an issue—and could therefore do likewise in engaging employees with a company mission.
Whether or not the mission statement is phrased as a question, it should be subject to constant questioning: Does it still make sense today? Are we, as a company, still living up to it (if we ever did)? Is the mission growing and pulling us forward? And lastly, Are we all on this mission together?
bigger issue involves incentives: How do you reward questioning?
most companies “the resources flow to the person with the most confident, best plan. Or the person with no failures on their record.”
companies must direct more budgetary resources to those who are exploring unanswered questions, conducting promising experiments, and taking intelligent risks. It’s a radical notion for most businesses, but “failed experiments” (which often pave the way for subsequent innovations) should be rewarded alongside proven successes,
“embraces curiosity as a fundamental value.”
some companies are now working on is How do we transform a workplace into a learn-place?
stimulate curiosity among any group of people is simply to expose them to as many original ideas and unusual viewpoints as possible.
the best corporate learning environments have some common elements. Bringing in outsiders to teach and inspire; encouraging insiders to teach each other; putting employees’ work on the walls to share ideas, especially on work in progress—all invite questioning and feedback from others and encourage greater collaboration.
All of which raises this question: What if a job interview tested one’s ability to ask questions, as well as answer them? The logical way to achieve that would be to ask interviewees to generate questions. While job interviews often end with the interviewee being asked, Do you have any questions?, that’s treated more as a rote throwaway line, and if anything it invites only closed, practical questions (When would I start? How much travel will there be?) as opposed to thoughtful, creative questions.
Why, What If, and How questions are recommended.
How might "Why, what if, and how" questions work as a brief or spec document?
if she has suggested a What If scenario, ask her to now challenge her own assumptions with Why questions, or get her to take her idea to a more practical level by generating How questions. This will show if a person knows how to “think in questions.”
“this feeling that if I listened hard to the deepest part of myself, there was a person in there who wanted to be adventurous. And I knew if I didn’t jump right then, I might never jump.”
she told the students to “live the questions.”
that the best I could do was get smarter at asking better questions. So I wanted them to learn that sooner, rather than later.”
attend every conference, take every call, answer every message, read every tweet, seize every opportunity—not so much because we want to, but because we feel we must, just to keep up.
straightforward question: Looking back on your career, twenty or thirty years from now, what do you want to say you’ve accomplished?
ask: How might I live up to my own sentence?
Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
Anyone in a coaching/advising role who offers generic answers should be eyed warily because nobody can provide answers that will fit your life, your particular problems or challenges.
the classic misconception people have about happiness is that it is a state of being you suddenly find or “arrive” at. But as Rubin and other experts on this subject tend to concur, creating happiness is ongoing. You don’t find it, you gradually figure it out for yourself—questioning and experimenting as you try to understand what makes you feel happy and how to bring more of that into your everyday life.
We have to construct meaning in our lives, based on everyday choices—and every one of those choices is a question. Why should I do X? Is it worth my time and effort to do Y?
When I look back in five years, which of these options will make the better story? As Hagel points out, “No one ever regrets taking the path that leads to a better story.”
People who are good at questioning are comfortable with uncertainty.
find one’s own “tortoise enclosure”—that19 sheltered, quiet place where you can go for extended periods to escape from the distractions of the outside world so that you can think without interruption. Cleese discusses this as a means of enabling oneself to write or engage in other creative activities, but going to the tortoise enclosure can also enable deep questioning (which is a form of creative thinking).
