Initially, we asked the obvious questions: How can we innovate on the flawed design of the Mars Polar Lander? How do we design a better three-legged lander to ensure a smooth landing? But these questions, as we’ll discover, weren’t the right questions to be asking. This chapter examines the importance of searching for a better question instead of a better answer. In the first part of this book (“Launch”), you learned how to reason from first principles and ignite your thinking by conducting thought experiments and taking moonshots to generate radical solutions to thorny problems. But often,
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