The 3-part formula to creating breakthrough questions for your business

Asking naïve or ‘beginner’s mind’ questions in your business puts you on the road to creative breakthrough questions.

Putting a stranger in the room when asking the WHY questions will bring another perspective to the questions being asked and will enable you to step back.

WHY questions are about seeing and understanding the problem and are the first questions to be asked in the 3-step breakthrough question formula.

This proven formula will enable you and your colleagues to ask simple, valuable and innovative questions.

After WHY comes WHAT IF.

A WHAT IF question starts you thinking about the possible solutions – the answers to the WHY question. The WHAT IF question generates options and ideas.

For example:

• “What if I could somehow have a darkroom inside my camera and produce the photo immediately?” (Edwin Land was asked this WHAT IF question and went on to invent the Polaroid camera.)
• “What if I paint over my mistakes when typing, the way I do when painting?” (Bette Nesmith Graham, a typist by day and a painter in her spare time, asked the WHAT IF question and went on to invent liquid paper.)

A HOW question is the stage where the rubber meets the road.

It stimulates and prompts you to act on the possibilities you have come up with through the WHAT IF questions, to test your ideas within your business.

The HOW stage is the point where things come together.

Of course, they may then fall apart again, but this can be a positive thing, as the greatest learning comes from failure. Failure creates more questioning and a desire to get it right.

Rather than running from failure in your business, you need to hold it to the light and ask:

WHY did the idea fail? WHAT IF I could take what I have learned from this failure and try another approach? HOW might I do that?