by Jeff Dyer
Similarly, Dr. William Hunter, product inventor and startup founder of Canadian-based Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, was intrigued by nontraditional ways that traditional drugs could be used. He ended up inventing the first surgical stent that was coated with a drug to reduce scar tissue (which causes up to a 20 percent failure rate in uncoated stents). His insight on coating stents came by changing the question traditional stent producers were asking, “How can we build a better stent?” to a more productive one, “What does the body do to these stents and why do they fail?” His relentless pursuit of the latter question ended up delivering a blockbuster product in the early 2000s.
In hot pursuit of what is, innovators inquire deeply for answers about what is happening right here and right now to gain understanding and empathy for others’ experience. IDEO (along with other successful design firms) employs diverse questions about the physical, intellectual, and emotional terrain to obtain a rich three-dimensional view of how end users actually operate. Intuit’s Scott Cook also does this by asking fundamental questions such as, “Where is the real problem?” “What’s the person trying to achieve?” “What’s most important?” and ultimately, “What’s the real pain point?” Innovators like Cook know their questions work when they reveal what is and build empathy for how it feels. Such empathic understanding produces the deep understanding behind better what-caused and what-if questions.
Tactic #2: Ask “what caused” questions
The next step in understanding the way things are is to ask causal questions to gain insights into why things are the way they are. To illustrate, Mike Collins, founder and former CEO of the Big Idea Group (BIG), a company that finds new product ideas through an inventor network and then launches them, shared an example of how inventors hunt down the real job to be done by understanding better what is really going on in their world. One inventor had pitched a fifteen-minute card game to Collins and his team for potential development and distribution by BIG. Collins felt that the game, as presented by the inventor, wouldn’t crack a tough family-gaming market. But instead of turning the inventor away, he paused and asked, “What caused you to develop this game?” The inventor quickly replied by answering a series of implicit who, what, when, where, and how questions: that he had three children (who) and little time after work (when) to spend with them at home (where). He wanted to have fun in the evening with his children (what), but there was no time for games like Monopoly or Risk. He was in search of a fifteen-minute game that would do the job of connecting him with his children for a quick and enjoyable few minutes at the end of the day.
From Collins’s initial what-caused question, a series of answers to implicit who, what, when, where questions emerged that resulted in a successful line of “12 Minute Games” sold through Target. These games did the job many families needed at the end of a busy day or long week, and the insight to that job came by asking questions that gave simple, but critical, insights into what was really going on in the inventor’s life.
Disrupt the Territory
After describing the territory well enough to thoroughly understand what is, innovators start their search for new, potentially disruptive solutions. They switch gears from descriptive questions to disruptive ones, like why, why not, and what if.
Tactic #3: Ask “why” and “why not” questions
Innovators persistently leverage why and why-not questions to acquire critical insights. Jeff Jones, founder of Campus Pipeline (a web platform that helps universities securely integrate campus communication and resources) and NxLight (an IT tool for simplifying the management of complex intercompany transactions by easily and securely exchanging documents), grasps this fact well, concluding: “Once you discover that asking why in a different way and not being content with what the answer is, it’s interesting what happens. You just have to go a little bit deeper asking questions one or two more times in a different way.” This is exactly what disruptive innovators do to discover new business ideas.
Consider the example of Edwin Land, cofounder of Polaroid.5 During a vacation with his family, Land took a picture of his three-year-old daughter. She could not immediately see the picture he had taken of her and wanted to know why. And, like most young children, probably asked why more than once. Her simple question pushed Land, an expert in photographic emulsions, to think deeply about the possibilities of “instant” photography. Why couldn’t she see the picture immediately? What would it take for instant photography to be a reality? Within a few hours, the scientist developed the basic insights that would eventually produce instant photographs, a product that would transform his company and disrupt an entire industry. In effect, his child’s naive question challenged industry assumptions and transformed Land’s technical knowledge into a revolutionary product—the Polaroid camera. This industry-changing camera delivered incredible impact between 1946 and 1986, ultimately selling over 150 million units and an even higher volume of expensive film packs for use in the cameras.
Are You Willing to Look Stupid?
So what stops you from asking questions? The two great inhibitors to questions are: (1) not wanting to look stupid, and (2) not being willing to be viewed as uncooperative or disagreeable. The first problem starts when we’re in elementary school. We don’t want to be seen as stupid by our friends or the teacher, and it is far safer to stay quiet. So we learn not to ask disruptive questions. Unfortunately, for most of us, this pattern follows us into adulthood. “I think a lot of people don’t ask questions because they don’t want to look stupid,” one innovator told us. “So everyone sits around playing along as if they know exactly what is going on. I see this happen a lot—people go along because they don’t want to be the one to question the emperor’s nakedness (as in the story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’).”
The second inhibitor is a concern about looking uncooperative, or even disrespectful. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, admitted that others sometimes see him as being disrespectful when he questions their ideas or point of view. How can you overcome these inhibitors? One innovator gave the following advice: “I often preface my questions by saying, ‘I like to be the guy that asks a lot of dumb questions about why things are the way they are.’” He says this helps him to detect whether it is safe to ask basic questions (that could seem dumb) or to question the way things are (without seeming uncooperative). The challenge for all of us is that there is a basic element of courage here, in being brave enough to be the one who says, “Wait, I don’t get it. Why are we doing it like this?”
Actually, the more powerful question behind our initial question, “Are you willing to look stupid?” really is, “Do you have sufficient self-esteem to be humble when you ask questions?” Over the years, we have found that great questioners have a high level of self-esteem and are humble enough to learn from anyone, even people who supposedly know less than they do. If this happens, they have learned to live the sage advice of Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner (early advocates of inquiry-based living and learning), where “once you have learned to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you need to know.”a
a. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Dell, 1969), 23.
Similarly, David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue and Azul airlines, says that one of his strengths “is an ability to look at a process or a practice that has been in place for a long time and ask myself, ‘Why don’t they do it this other way?’ And sometimes I find myself thinking the answer is so obvious that I wonder, ‘Why has no one else ever thought of this before?’” For example, Neeleman’s first startup was a charter airline called Morris Air. At the time, airline tickets were treated like money; if you lost your ticket, it was like losing cash. This created problems for travelers as they dealt with the challenges of lost tickets and for airlines as they tried to send tickets securely to travelers. One day, an employee was complaining about a ticket
problem, prompting Neeleman to ask, “Why do we treat tickets like cash? Is there a better way?” This question sparked an idea, “Why not give customers a code when they buy a ticket that they could give us at the airport with their identification?” This idea led to the creation of eTickets, an idea that eventually spread throughout the industry after Southwest Airlines purchased Morris Air.
In his most recent venture, Azul, Neeleman asked his senior team, “Why aren’t more Brazilians taking advantage of Azul’s low fares?” Azul’s flights were cheaper than those of the competition, but his question surfaced the real challenge—getting price-sensitive customers to the airport. Then Neeleman asked, “How much does a cab cost for our typical customer to get to the airport?” The answer was “too much,” potentially 40 percent to 50 percent of the airline-ticket cost. So Neeleman searched for lower-cost bus or train alternatives, but they were either nonexistent or too infrequent. This prompted him to then ask, “Why not start our own free bus service to get customers to the airports?” (to take advantage of Azul’s inexpensive fares). Today, passengers book (mostly online) more than three thousand bus rides per day to the airport with Azul, the fastest-growing airline in Brazil, which flew more than 21 million passengers in 2018.
In Asia, Taiichi Ohno, a former engineer at Toyota who is known as the chief architect of the Toyota Production System, put a five-whys questioning process—a technique for asking “what caused” questions—at the core of his innovative production system. The five-whys process requires that when confronted with a problem, one should ask why at least five times to unravel causal chains and come up with innovative solutions. Many of the world’s most innovative companies have adopted variations of the five-whys process to push employees to ask why as they search for a better understanding of what is and new responses to what might be.
Tactic #4: Ask “what if” questions
Meg Whitman, formerly of eBay, worked directly with a number of innovative entrepreneurs and founders, including Omidyar (eBay), Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (Skype and Kazaa), and Peter Thiel (PayPal) and Elon Musk (PayPal, Tesla). When asked how these folks differ from typical executives, Whitman replied, “My experience is that they get a kick out of screwing up the status quo. They can’t bear it. So they spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about how to change the world. And as they think and brainstorm, they like to ask, ‘If we did this, what would happen?’”
Omidyar is a perfect example. As a systems analyst, he designs end-user interfaces from the ground up with no preconceived way of doing things. To do this, Omidyar probes deeply by asking a series of questions, such as, “What would be the cleanest way to solve it?” He sees himself as “the devil’s advocate in the room saying things like, ‘What if it really didn’t work this way? Or what if we really did do the opposite of this? What would happen then?’”
In sharp contrast to disruptive innovators, delivery-driven executives in our research were far less likely to ask what-if questions that challenged their company’s strategy or business model. Data from our 360-degree survey assessments of executives around the world revealed that most managers do not regularly question the status quo (though they often think they do). They prefer routine to rocking the boat and adhere to the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But innovators actively look for things that are “broke” and activate a pattern of what-if questioning to surface new angles of inquiry. One technique that innovators use when imagining the future is to ask what-if questions that either impose constraints or eliminate constraints.
Ask “what if” questions to impose constraints. Most of us constrain our thinking only when forced to deal with real-world limitations, such as shrinking budgets or technology restrictions, but innovative thinkers do the opposite. Marissa Mayer, former Google vice president of search products and user experience, once said: “Creativity loves constraint. When people think of it in terms of artistic work—unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you’ll find that some of the most inspiring art forms—haikus, sonatas, religious paintings—are fraught with constraints. They are beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules . . . Creativity, in fact, thrives best when constrained.”6
Questions that artificially impose constraints can trigger unexpected insight by forcing people to think around the constraint. To initiate a creative discussion about growth opportunities at one company in our study, an executive asked this question: “If we were legally prohibited from selling our current products to our current customers, how would we make money next year?” This constraining question led to an insightful exploration of ways the company could find and serve new customers.
Variations of the same question can provoke surprising ideas. For example, you and your team might ask:
If the disposable income of our current customers (or our budget) dropped by 50 percent, how would our product or service have to change?
If air transportation was no longer possible, how would we change the way we do business?
Asking questions that place constraints on solutions forces out-of-the-box thinking because it ignites new associations. This is precisely what Apple did to come up with the iPod (“What if we created an MP3 player that could fit in a shirt pocket but hold five hundred to a thousand songs?”) and highly successful experience-centered retail stores (“What if we used a regular-sized retail store to sell a very small number of Apple-only products?”).
Likewise, Hindustan Unilever (Unilever’s business in India) wondered how it could reach millions of potential consumers in small Indian villages where severe constraints existed: no retail distribution network, no advertising coverage, and poor roads and transport. Collectively these constraints challenged its existing business model and produced a fundamental question: “How might we sell products in small villages without any access to traditional distribution networks, advertising, or infrastructure?” The answer ultimately surfaced from direct-selling business models (from companies like Avon). In close partnership with nongovernmental organizations, banks, and the government, Hindustan Unilever recruited women in self-help groups across rural India to become direct-to-consumer sales distributors for its soaps and shampoos. The company also provided substantial training for them to succeed as microentrepreneurs. (By 2009, the innovative solution in a highly constrained country context produced over forty-five thousand women entrepreneurs selling Hindustan Unilever products to three million consumers in a hundred thousand villages.7)
Ask “what if” questions to eliminate constraints. Great questions also eliminate the constraints that we can unnecessarily impose on our thinking due to a focus on resource allocations, decisions, or technology limitations. To counter this tendency, one innovative CEO finds these questions key to eliminating unwanted sunk-cost constraints: “What if you had not already hired this person, installed this equipment, implemented this process, bought this business, or pursued this strategy? Would you do it today?” Jack Welch often posed the same kinds of questions during his two-decade tenure as GE’s CEO. Questions like these quickly and effectively toss sunk costs (financial and nonfinancial) right out the window.
Questioning Dilemmas for Senior Leaders
When it comes to status quo–challenging questions, leaders (particularly CEOs) face two key dilemmas.a The first is that top executives are generally rewarded for generating better strategies or new business models, but they are also punished if they publicly question their firm’s own strategy or existing business model. CEOs are expected to provide answers, not questions, to key external and internal stakeholders. One CEO told us, “If I openly question our strategy or key initiatives, this could create a crisis of confidence within the company. People don’t like that kind of uncertainty.” Senior executives know, as researchers David Krantz and Penelope Bacon do, that “to question an act, belief, or experience runs the risk of disrupting the activity.”b When this happens, financial markets worldwide are generally
unforgiving and punish such disruptions, at least in the short run.
The second dilemma for leaders is that it’s difficult for people in the organization to ask the top boss questions that challenge the status quo. After all, the CEO may have reached his position by creating the status quo. So while CEOs may be in the best position to ask and respond to questions, they actually face major constraints in asking and receiving questions that challenge the status quo. As a result, it is no small feat for a CEO to create a culture that fosters the kind of questioning that produces innovative outcomes, particularly new businesses and business models.
Many innovative founders and CEOs address the first dilemma by cultivating an informal network of people whom they can question, and who will question them. For example, an innovative CEO at a major multinational firm told us that he has formed an informal, unofficial group of confidantes. “It’s a fairly senior, fairly seasoned set of people who are comfortable throwing out ideas and then forgetting about them if these hunches or speculation aren’t right,” he said. “I can ask any question of these folks and they’ll give me a straight answer.”
Tackling the second dilemma is a little trickier, as the challenge can be culturally sensitive. In some country—and company—cultures, you simply don’t question the boss. For example, cross-cultural research suggests that eight in ten Japanese would agree with the following statement about the role of leaders: “It is important for a manager to have at hand the precise answers to most of the questions his or her subordinates may raise about their work.”c The result is that Japanese leaders are expected to deliver answers to their people, not questions, particularly not status quo–challenging ones. But a company or country culture that fails to encourage questioning sounds the death knell for disruptive innovation. Regardless of the cultural context, CEOs hoping to generate innovative ideas must make clear that leadership requires asking questions that challenge the way things are, even if such practices were established by the CEO on the way to the top!