When so much information is readily available to anyone online, the key to innovation is not gathering more data but rather asking more questions--the ambitious, frame-changing sort that send companies down unexpected paths of inquiry. So argues business journalist Warren Berger, author of the new book A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. Berger supplied the answers, for a change, in a recent conversation with Inc. editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan.
What makes a question "beautiful"?
A beautiful question reframes an issue and forces you to look at it in a different way. It challenges assumptions and is really ambitious. Often, these questions begin with the phrase "How might we..." They have a magnetic quality that makes people want to answer them, to talk about them, to work on them. They make the imagination race. The Polaroid camera came out of a 3-year-old girl's asking, "Why do we have to wait for the picture?" That's a beautiful question.
What questions don't get asked early or often enough in innovation projects?
There are two kinds. First, the fundamental ones. Why are we doing this? What do people really care about? Second are the crazy questions. What if we did this backward? What if we were to subvert all the assumptions in the field and do something that sounds ridiculous? Interesting ideas can come out of exploring impossible things. There's a place for asking those out-there questions early on, when you are in the most open stage of thinking.