The Creative Thinking Toolkit
Tool #1 Ask a Better Question
Main Idea
The mind is actually capable of doing much more than we demand of it in our normal day-to-day activities. One key to getting better ideas is, therefore, to ask better questions.
At first, this sounds too simple to be of any value. The best questions will take your mind to somewhere you have not planned on going by throwing up interesting to little realized facts.
By asking better questions, you start the creative process in a better place than everyone else. Good questions will trigger curiously, cause your mind to stretch and your imagination to soar. And if you keep asking good follow-up questions, you’ll always be moving forward in developing new and original ways to look at problems others have considered for years.
How do you actually do this??
Assume you know nothing at all about how people have attacked this problem in the past. Now ask question s that a complete novice would ask. Instead of being guided by established industry practice, your questions will be more logic and good sense based.
Or, you might make some assumptions that are not, at present, true. Consider how things would be different if these assumptions were true, and then see whether that mental stimulus leads you into some interesting ideas and directions.
Or, you might encourage original thinking by asking:” what’s something highly unusual that you would never expect to find in the design of this product--- and if that feature were present, how the product itself be different from the way it is now? The more zany and original the unusual design features you consider, the more possibilities arise for new products to be visualized which nobody else has the nerve to think of yet. This may generate original ideas.
Examples
Suppose you were trying to find creative ways to upgrade a TV station’s news broadcasts. Instead of asking yourself,” what have others done in the past?”, you could ask some better questions:
● How could we do an entire newscast in one minute?
● How could we do a newscast with no anchors?
● How could we do a newscast with no sound?
● How could we program 24-hours of newscasts without repeating items too frequently?
This may lead to the idea of broadcasting news with more graphical data on screen than talking heads. That way, people will be able to take in facts even if there is loads of background noise. And perhaps a news ticker running along the bottom of the screen would allow more information to be packed in. It might even be used for time and temperature or other information.