A More Beautiful Question (25 page)

What would Neil Patrick Harris do?
²⁶

Andrew Rossi of the marketing firm M Booth has found that one of the best ways to stoke creativity during brainstorming sessions is to ask people in the group to think about the problem they’re trying to solve from an unusual perspective. So, for example, if a company is introducing a new toothpaste, they might ask:
How would IKEA tackle a challenge like this?
Another approach is to add in an odd constraint, such as
What if your idea had to involve speed dating?
Rossi’s group sometimes suggests adopting the perspective of a well-known artist or entertainer:
What would Jay-Z do in this situation?
How would J. K. Rowling think about this?
What might Neil Patrick Harris do?
(The latter has been described as “an actor, singer, dancer, producer, director, writer, child stardom survivor, evil genius, amateur puppeteer, and magic enthusiast”—so he might do just about anything.)

Tim Brown, the chief executive of IDEO, says that when his firm takes on a design challenge of almost any type, it invariably starts by asking
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.”

Although the HMW has been used
²⁷
at IDEO for a number of years, its origins can be traced back fifty years to Sidney Parnes, a leading creativity expert at the time who headed up the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, New York. Min Basadur studied at the CPSI during his tenure as a creative manager at Procter & Gamble in the early 1970s, and he adapted some of Parnes’ brainstorming ideas to help P&G’s marketers—who, at the time, were working themselves into a lather as they tried to compete with Colgate-Palmolive’s popular new soap, Irish Spring, which featured a green stripe and an appealing “refreshment” promise.

By the time Basadur was asked to assist on the project, P&G had already tested a half dozen of its own copycat green-stripe bars, though none could best Irish Spring. Basadur figured the P&G team was asking the wrong question (
How can we make a better green-stripe bar?
) and soon had them asking a series of more ambitious HMW questions, culminating with
How might we create a more refreshing soap of our own?
That opened the creative floodgates, and over the next few hours, Basadur says, hundreds of ideas were generated for possible refreshment bars—with the team eventually converging around a theme of finding refreshment at the seacoast. Out of that came a coastal-blue and white-striped bar named (what else?) Coast, which became a highly successful brand.

As the Coast story suggests, there’s more to HMW methodology than just using those three words. Basadur employed a larger process to guide people toward the
right
HMW questions. This included a number of Why questions (as in,
Why are we trying so hard to make another green-striped soap?
). He also urged the P&G team to step back from their obsession with a competitor’s product and look at the situation from a consumer perspective. For the customer, it wasn’t about green stripes—it was about feeling refreshed.

Basadur maintains that it’s common for companies to expend efforts asking the wrong questions and trying to solve the wrong problems. “Most businesspeople have limited skills when it comes to ‘problem-finding’ or problem definition,” he says. “It’s not taught in MBA programs.” To fill that void, Basadur opened a consultancy, Basadur Applied Creativity, which developed its own “Simplex” process of creative problem solving for business—with HMW questioning at the core of it.

Gradually, Basadur took the How might we? approach beyond P&G to other companies, including the tech firm Scient. One of his converts at Scient, the designer Charles Warren, then took the methodology with him as he moved to IDEO. IDEO’s Brown confesses that when he was introduced to the notion of encouraging businesspeople to ask
How might we?
, “I was skeptical at first—it sounds a bit Californian.” But before long, says Warren, IDEO was conducting companywide question-storming sessions with seven hundred people asking the question together.

When Charles Warren then moved from IDEO to Google, the infectious HMW approach found a new host. Warren led the user-experience design team that took on the challenge of creating Google+. “We were asking
How might we?
questions every day,” he says. At Google, such questions can run the gamut from
How might we predict whether a flu outbreak is going to happen, based on search queries?
to
How might we help more people feel more comfortable sharing more of their lives in social media?
Most recently, HMW was carried from Google to Facebook by a member of the Google+ team.

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.”

Will anyone follow a leader who embraces uncertainty?

“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.”

That shouldn’t be surprising. Patnaik notes that most business execs rose up through the ranks because “they were good at giving answers. But it means they’ve had little experience at formulating questions.” The questions they are accustomed to asking are more practical and interrogative:
How much is this going to cost us? Who’s responsible for this problem? How are the numbers looking?
(Or, to cite one of Patnaik’s favorite dumb questions,
What’s our version of the iPad?
)

That kind of practical, give-me-the-facts questioning has its place. Such questions can help in running a business, but not necessarily in leading it. Adam Bryant, who writes the
New
²⁸
York Times
Corner Office column, featuring weekly interviews with top CEOs, says the best leaders understand that asking open, exploratory questions can help them figure out what’s coming and where new opportunities lie, so that they can lead their company in new directions. Ron Shaich of Panera observes, “When you’re leading a team, a start-up, or a public company, your primary occupation must be to discover the future. A compelling and even subversive question is an effective tool for navigating uncharted terrain.”

The problem with asking questions, for some business leaders, is that it exposes a lack of expertise and, in theory, makes them vulnerable. That many of today’s most successful CEOs are questioners, as documented in the research of Hal Gregersen and Clay Christensen, would seem to disprove that theory. But the myth lingers that business leaders must be all-knowing, decisive, and in possession of infallible “gut instincts,” all of which leaves little room for questioning.

Randy Komisar, a leading Silicon Valley
²⁹
venture capitalist, says the best business leaders and entrepreneurs have a different attitude toward “answers.” “They understand that answers are relative. You can have an answer for right now, but it changes.”

Because change is now a constant, the willingness to be comfortable with, and even to embrace, ambiguity is critical for today’s leaders. The consultant Bryan Franklin has observed that effective
³⁰
leaders today may not appear to be entirely decisive because they are forced to reconcile conflicting forces and paradoxes in the current marketplace. Such leaders often find themselves “standing at the intersection between seemingly contradictory truths”: How do you balance growth with social responsibility? How do you enrich your offering while streamlining production? And so forth.

Why can’t everyone accept credit cards?
³¹

Jack Dorsey, one of the cofounders of Twitter, is a business leader who embraces the credo, “Question everything.” Upon learning that a friend, glassworks designer Jim McKelvey, lost a $2,000 sale because he couldn’t accept a potential customer’s credit card, Dorsey wondered,
Why is it that only companies are able to accept credit cards?
Partnering with McKelvey, Dorsey envisioned an easy-to-use alternative to clunky, expensive card-reading equipment:
What if all you needed to swipe a credit card was a smart phone or tablet?
As to the “how” of making this feasible, Dorsey and the designers at his startup, Square, devised a small plastic plug (easily inserted into a smart phone jack) that serves as a card reader, and added a clean, intuitive user interface, accessible via a smart phone app. The elegant simplicity of Square (and that of Dorsey’s earlier creation, Twitter) is a product of rigorous inquiry: Dorsey maintains that good design is about removing unnecessary features by continually asking,
Do we really need this?
and
What can we take away?

In the midst of such complexity, leaders need extraordinary “sensemaking” capabilities,
³²
according to Deborah Ancona, the director of the MIT Leadership Center. Ancona defines this as “the ability to make sense of what’s going on in a changing and complex environment.” To do this, she maintains, leaders must be able to get beyond their own assumptions, take in vast amounts of new information, and figure out how to apply all of that to their business, sometimes doing that via experimentation. This adds up to a lot of Why, What If, and
How questions.

The leader needn’t, indeed shouldn’t, be asking these questions alone. “One of the most important things to know about becoming more of a questioning leader is that the questions don’t all have to come from you,” says Patnaik. If others are given permission and encouraged to question, they can contribute a range of perspectives and help raise the kinds of Why and What If questions that might never occur to the person at the top.

A great source of questioning input can and probably should come from outside the company—from those who have enough distance to question the company as a naïve outsider.

The late, legendary business guru Peter Drucker
³³
was known for coming into companies with an outsider’s perspective, which enabled him to see problems and issues that insiders might have missed. Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute, says people often wonder how Drucker achieved his stature as “the man who invented management” and the go-to adviser for half a century for every company from GM to Procter & Gamble to Coca-Cola. The answer can be summed up in a word: questions.

Drucker “understood that his job wasn’t to serve up answers,” according to Wartzman. Drucker once remarked that his greatest strength was “to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” Often those questions were deceptively simple, as in
Who is your customer? What business are you in?
The clients who hired Drucker may have started out expecting the great consultant to offer brilliant solutions to all their problems. But as he told one client, “The answers have to be yours.”

Today, many consultants don’t follow Drucker’s model; they’re more apt to adopt the role of “experts” whose job is to provide answers. (And as author Dan Ariely noted
³⁴
in
Harvard Business Review,
company leaders often prefer being supplied with answers over questions “because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking.”) But as Drucker knew, 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.

While the leader can look outside for help with questioning, certain core leadership questions can only be answered by looking inward. When Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase,
³⁵
first took the helm at that company, he struggled with what his role should be as a leader, wondering,
What does a CEO look like and feel like? What’s the texture of what you’re supposed to be?

Hackett initially focused on some of the wrong questions; he was overly concerned with what others (in particular, the family that owned the company) wanted or expected from him. But gradually he concluded that his role as a leader was to “look at the chaos and provide a point of view about what needs to be done.” Today, he maintains that one of the most important things a leader can do is project a clear and distinctive point of view that others can follow. But that clear vision is arrived at, and constantly modified and sharpened, through deep reflection and questioning.