A few weeks ago we asked you what questions you use to stimulate
creativity and innovation. We received some great suggestions about
specific questions to use. Rolf Smith passed along a great story and
a series of tips on asking great questions. And, I found some
concise pointers from Jay Arthur in my quote files ... Jay kindly
agreed to having them passed along (bless the internet for its
ability to connect all of us!).

The result is a veritable feast of ideas about how to ask better
questions. See if you can use any of these suggestions to shake up
your thinking on some particularly nagging issue.

Have a great week. Joyce Wycoff

From: Anne Naylor

My building science professor at Sheffield University advised us
that creativity was a matter of knowing the questions to ask. I use
a technique I call: Sewing Seeds With Questions. A brainstorm/data
dump of questions that I throw into paper and leave alone. Once the
question has been asked, the unconscious begins working on the
answer. Tne answers show up usually quite spontaneously. Here are
some that I use:

What is the best next question I can ask?
Who can assist me with this issue?
Where is the best place I can go for what I need?
What do I really need?
How can I be most creative in this situation?

From: Richard Weddle

What if you had to solve this problem and you had just
10 minutes?

What if you had $60 billion to do this? Now, go do
that for $3,000 with a customer.

From: Cathy Bolger

When I am helping a client see options, I sometimes ask, 'If you had
a magic wand and could choose to make anything happen, what would it
be?'

From: Nancy Rogen

I find that an includeant part of the questioning process is
considering who needs to 'buy in to the new idea' for it to be
successful so I might ask questions like:

Who will need to implement and support this idea?
What involvement have they had in the process?
How can we bring them into the process, and build their
commitment to shared success?
What will happen if these implementation partners are not on
board with our new ideas and direction?

Without recognizing the power of resistance, it can become
impossible to implement even the most creative and innovative idea.
Sometimes I need to recalibrate my work so that it can be embraced
by others if it is to be successful.

From: Brian Tillotson

My two favorites:

What else could we do?
What's the *real* problem?

From: Charlie Girsch

Pete Scholtes, a quality guru and author, in The Leader's Handbook,
McGraw Hill talks about asking GOOD QUESTIONS (pages 266-269) and
provides the following Seven Basic All-Purpose Questions

Why? ( ask at least five times)
What is the Purpose? (augment with what will it take? when
will we know it is successful?)
What will it take to accomplish this? (by what method?)
Will customers give a rat's tuch about this?
What is your premise?
What date do you have? (what date might you get? - move from
hunch to fact)
Where does your date come from? (how do you assure yourself
that the data are valid?)

From Jay Arthur (with permission)

Here's a few more things to think about asking good questions:
1. use presuppositions to get better answers:
How could we MOST EASILY ... expand our market, etc.?
How could we MOST SAFELY ... invest for maximum returns in
2001?
How could we HAVE THE MOST FUN ... getting to know new
people?

2. 'How' questions tend to initiate action.
'Why' questions tend to create judgement.
'What, Where, When, Who' questions tend to set the scene or
environment.

3. Well-formed questions are:
Positive (What do I want? as opposed to What don't I want?)
Personably Actionable (What can I do? vs Why won't he/she
change?)
Robust (What else might be affected if we achieve this?)
Present tense
Evidence (Who, where, when, with whom do you want this?)

-- Jay Arthur - The KnowWare® Man,
knowwareman@mindspring.com

From: Rolf Smith (from an unknown source)

'Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?' - JENNIE TEIG RABI

Isaac Isador Rabi, Nobel laureate and one of the most distinguished
physicists of the 20th century, invented a sensitive technique for
probing the structure of atoms and molecules and thereby opened a
new field of science in the 1930s. That achievement and many others
earned Rabi every significant honor a physicist might hope to win.
When an interviewer once asked Rabi to what he attributed his
successes, he reached back into his childhood and quoted his
mother's habitual greeting when he returned home from school each
day: 'Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?'

A good question is an irritant! It forces people to think. Today,
where everyone is in a hurry, answers seem to be more includeant than
questions. Answers make us able to go on with business, whereas
questions force us to pause and consider what we are doing.
Questions take time. For a society concerned with innovation,
questions are much more includeant than answers.

Somewhere I read that the average child asks 125 questions a day,
the average adult asks six.

All too soon children learn to stop asking questions that Mommy and
Daddy can't answer. The same thing happens later in school with
teachers. In fact, in school we learn answers to questions we never
asked. Unfortunately, you cannot simply tell people answers to
questions they haven't asked - they won't be able to hear the
answers. The end result is that we begin to shy away from questions.
We lose our curiosity and inquisitiveness. And yet, questions are
the primary way we learn. Socrates taught by asking questions, and
through his questions, directed his students' focus, causing them to
come up with their own answers.

So how do we relearn to think again in a creative, stimulating way -
to question? Roger Schank suggest that we consider these three
things:

1. You must be asked questions either by yourself, by
others, or by situations you encounter.
2. Those questions must be out of the ordinary. If you have
been asked these questions before, you won't have to think.
3. Someone whom you respect must evaluate your answer - and
you must defend your answer as well.

Tip!
Pick a favorite question and begin asking it in places you didn't
ask it before, particularly questions that everyone seems to know
the answer to:
- At school
- At work
- With your parents, family
- With your friends

Tip! Start keeping track of the questions which you ask habitually,
those you are comfortable with. These are the questions which
direct your focus, and therefore, how you think and how you feel.
Reflect on the kinds of answers they generate - and how those
answers affect the quality and focus of your life.

To change your life, your focus, your direction, you must change the
questions which you ask habitually - both of other people and of
yourself. Tony Robbins suggests that questions accomplish three
specific things:

1. Questions immediately change what you're focusing on and
therefore how you feel. Learning to ask empowering
questions in moments of crisis is a critical skill.
2. Questions change what you delete. Because it is
difficult to concentrate on a number of things at one time,
your brain constantly tries to prioritize what to pay
attention to - and more includeantly, what not to pay
attention to, i.e., what to delete.
3. Questions change the resources available to you. They
affect your beliefs and thus what you consider possible or
impossible. The words you use in your questions,
particularly the habitual ones, put presuppositions in place
in your mind and in your answers. Our beliefs frequently
affect the questions we'll even consider.

Tip! Learn to ask 'Why?' again. Today, as part of the quality and
continuous improvement process in many companies, employees are
being taught to ask 'Why?' five times. In root cause analysis
processes, the five Why's essentially 'peel back the onion' to
expose the underlying cause.

Gerald Nadler and Shozo Hibino have put forth the 'Purposes
Principle' for breakthrough thinking: Finding the right purpose to
work on involves thinking about purposes behind the problem at
different levels and asking 'Why?' repeatedly to expand the problem
into a larger mess of interrelated problems. Accepting a problem as
stated almost always means that the beliefs, constraints and
experiences already associated with it are accepted as well. If you
expand your thinking beyond the most immediate, obvious purpose and
think in broader terms of what you want to accomplish, your solution
options will explode.