A More Beautiful Question (16 page)

Contextual inquiry requires a commitment to the question you’re exploring. It’s one thing to ponder questions in your room, or within your own company’s offices, or in online surveys; it’s another to go out there and, as Novogratz says, “spend time sitting on the floor with people, listening to them as they tell you about their lives.” Deciding to go to that level is part of taking ownership of a question. It’s about pausing, before jumping in headlong, to ask,
Why is this
my
problem? And if it’s not my problem, why
should it be
?

While I was interviewing Srikanth Srinivas—the man who asks people to count squares and look for unseen windows—he asked an interesting question. We were discussing how breakthroughs often start with a question and were focused on stories such as those of Netflix and Polaroid. Srinivas noted that the questions that were asked (
Why should I have to pay late fees? Why do we have to wait for the picture?
) were ordinary questions that could have been asked by anyone. Then he added, “But most people would have asked a question like that and then not acted on it. So the question is,
why do some people act on a question?
”

There’s no one answer to that; you could say it has to do with imagination, determination—or sometimes desperation, as in the case of Van Phillips and his prosthetic foot. But this much can be said of Phillips, Polaroid’s Land, Netflix’s Hastings, Acumen’s Novogratz, the Airbnb founders, and others in this book: Confronted with a problem that was larger than themselves, they decided to make that problem—and the question that defined the problem—their own.

The difference between just asking a question or pursuing it is the difference between flirting with an idea or living with it. If you choose the latter, the question will likely become what the psychotherapist Eric Maisel calls a “productive obsession.”
³⁵
It will surface, recede, then surface again. It will invade your dreams as it embeds itself in your subconscious. You’ll wrestle with it, walk with it, sleep with it. And all of this will prove helpful during the What If stage of inquiry.

What If . . .

What if we could map the DNA of music?

Before he changed the way many
³⁶
listen to music, Tim Westergren was himself a musician, playing in a rock band that, like most bands and musicians Westergren knew back then, struggled to find an audience. Many of the musicians he knew were talented, but found themselves in that classic catch-22: they couldn’t build a sizable following unless they were played on the radio, and they couldn’t get played on the radio unless they had a sizable following.

So this prompted the initial Why question—
Why can’t good musicians find the audience they deserve?
—that lodged in Westergren’s head. He eventually quit the band to get a job in the film industry as a music composer. But his question stayed with him.

In his new line of work, Westergren’s job was to create music that reflected someone else’s tastes. “As a film composer, your job is to profile your director’s tastes and give them what they want,” Westergren told
The Street
. But he didn’t just ask directors what they liked; instead, he played various types of music for them to see how they reacted. Then, he would create what he called “an informal genome of musical tastes in my head.”

This led to what some would call an epiphany, though it was actually a moment of connective inquiry. Westergren was reading a magazine article about the folk musician Aimee Mann—a talented artist with a modest following who, in Westergren’s words, “was sort of stuck in this no-man’s-land . . . she was being shelved, and her records weren’t being released.”

Reading about Mann resurfaced the question Westergren had contemplated before about why musicians couldn’t find audiences, but now something different happened; the question didn’t just hang in the air. Westergren began to connect what he had recently learned—“this process I’d developed to profile music taste”—to the problem faced by Aimee Mann and so many other musicians.

What if there was a way to use music profiling to somehow connect Aimee Mann with an audience inclined to like the kind of music she makes?

Westergren knew the technology existed to create algorithmic engines capable of making fairly straightforward and predictable recommendations (“If you liked that murder-mystery book, here is another murder-mystery book you might like”). But what he was envisioning was something far more sophisticated: a system that could analyze why you liked the music you liked, based on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subtle musical characteristics and attributes. He would have to find a way to break music down to its most basic elements—or, to use the biological analogy that Westergren was thinking of, its genes. So this was the real question he had to tackle:

What if we could map the DNA of music?

Once he had his What If question, the How stage began, as it often does, with sharing the idea and trying to drum up support. Westergren secured enough backing (in part from maxing out his own credit cards) to hire a team of musicians and techies. Then they began to work on their experiment.

Every day, a group of musicians hired by Westergren would come in to work, put on a pair of headphones, and listen to music. They analyzed every song, breaking the music down into some four hundred attributes—starting with broad categories such as melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, vocal performance. Each of those categories was further subdivided into basic building blocks, or “genes”; voice, for example, could have as many as twenty-five to thirty attributes, from raspy to smooth. While the musicians dissected the music, the tech engineers developed a specialized search engine. Both parts were critical; Westergren felt the “secret sauce” he was developing relied on a blend of human judgment and algorithm.

It took the better part of a year to build a prototype—“because it takes a while to analyze music that way,” Westergren explained. “It’s actually completely f---ing ridiculous to do it like that, but it was the only strategy I could think of.”

The first time he tested the prototype, Westergren typed in a Beatles song and the system offered up a recommendation: a Bee Gees song. Westergren, thinking of 1970s, disco-style Bee Gees songs, panicked briefly. But Westergren’s creation was, on this musical point at least, smarter than he was—early Bee Gees songs were actually similar, musically, to the Beatles song he had input.

Today, Pandora Radio has seventy million listeners. Westergren is proud that it answers not only the question of whether music can be mapped genetically, but also that original query of his—about finding a way to match up musicians with listeners. Every day, Westergren says, Pandora takes the music of relatively unknown bands and feeds that music to listeners most apt to enjoy it. Those listeners may not care about musical genes or the career prospects of obscure musicians, but the service answers a different question for them:
What if a radio station could know what songs you would like before
you
knew?

The Pandora story, like many stories of inquiry-driven start-ups, started with someone’s wondering about an unmet need. It concluded with the questioner, Westergren, figuring out how to bring a fully realized version of the answer into the world.

But what happened in between? That’s when the lightning struck. In Westergren’s case, ideas and influences began to come together; he combined what he knew about music with what he was learning about technology. Inspiration was drawn from a magazine article, and from a seemingly unrelated world (biology). A vision of a new possibility began to form in the mind. It all resulted in an audacious hypothetical question that might or might not have been feasible—but was exciting enough to rally people to the challenge of trying to make it work.

The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible. Those possibilities may not survive the more practical How
stage; but it’s critical to innovation that there be a time for wild, improbable ideas to surface and to inspire.

If the word
why
has a penetrative power, enabling the questioner to get past assumptions and dig deep into problems, the words
what if
have a more expansive effect—allowing us to think without limits or constraints, firing the imagination. John Seely Brown has written, “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 we combine three snacks into one? (And then add a prize?)
³⁸

In the 1890s, Frederick Rueckheim, fresh from his native Germany to seek his fortune in Chicago, had a flash of connective inquiry: Observing the growing popularity of candy, peanuts, and popcorn snacks, Rueckheim wondered:
What if I combine all of those into one?
He vended his mixture at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, but it wasn’t quite right yet; the candy-coated popcorn tended to clump together, and the name—Candied Popcorn and Peanuts—was accurate but not compelling. On the question of
How to keep it all from sticking together?
Rueckheim added oil to the mix. As for the name, it arrived unexpectedly in 1896, when someone sampled the snack and declared, “That’s crackerjack!” An inveterate questioner, Rueckheim kept wondering,
What can be added to Cracker Jack to make it even more appealing?
In 1913 he inserted the final ingredient—small prizes.

The Pandora What If question certainly introduced something “strange” into the world—Westergren’s notion that you could take the whole vast universe of music and break it down in a genetic manner struck many (especially musicians) as an off-the-wall idea. But the beauty of the What If stage of questioning is that it’s a time when off-the-wall ideas are welcome.

Where do those wild, speculative ideas come from? Obviously, if we knew the precise location of the source, and how to access it, then creativity wouldn’t be as mysterious and unpredictable as it is. But we do know that coming up with original ideas or insights—the kind of lightbulb moments that can lead to imaginative 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.

It can be a relief to know that, in coming up with fresh ideas, we don’t have to invent from scratch; we can draw upon what already exists and use that as raw material. The key may lie in connecting those bits and pieces in a clever, unusual, and useful way, resulting in (to use a term that seems to have
³⁹
originated with the British designer John Thackara)
smart recombinations
.

Smart recombinations are all around us. Pandora, for example, is a combination of radio station and search engine; it also takes the biological model of genetic coding and transfers it to the domain of music (a smart recombination often takes ideas or influences from separate domains and mashes them together). In today’s tech world, many of the most successful products—Apple’s iPhone being just one notable example—are hybrids, melding functions and features in new ways.

Companies, too, can be smart recombinations. Netflix was started as a video-rental business that operated like a monthly membership health club (and now it has added “TV production studio” to the mix). Airbnb is a combination of an online travel agency, a social media platform, and a good old-fashioned bed-and-breakfast (the B&B itself is a smart recombination from way back).

People have been combining and recombining ideas for as long as there have been ideas, but in the Internet age, the opportunities and possibilities for creating “mashups” seem limitless. “The creative act is no longer
⁴⁰
about building something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural products that already exist,” according to
Wired
magazine.

Smart recombinations are inspired in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they are the result of cold calculation (
How can we combine
this
moneymaking thing with
that
moneymaking thing to make even more money?
); sometimes they’re a product of serendipity. In the case of the hit book
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
, it was a little of both. The book’s author, Seth Grahame-Smith,
⁴¹
was in a bookstore and noticed one “bestseller table” full of vampire books, while a nearby table was piled high with Lincoln biographies. As Grahame-Smith later confessed to the
New York Times
, he looked at those two piles, and “sort of shrewdly, from a cynical standpoint, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could combine these two things?’”