Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

Set sights unreasonably high. Ask more of yourself and others without being
limited by the laws of gravity. There will be plenty of time to come back to earth
later. If you don’t aim high, you will never go into orbit.

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Try a little time travel. Creative thinking is all about the future, so go there. Put
your questions in the future tense and ask people to transport themselves there
with you.
Invoke imagined reality. Role-play. You’re living in that new world, workplace,
or community. What’s it like? Look up, down, 360 degrees around. What do you
see? What do you think? What’s next?
Embrace disruption. Questions that drive creativity involve disruptive thinking
that can be unsettling, uncomfortable, and sometimes downright subversive.
That’s how we change the world.
Beyond the Possible
Creativity questions reach for the stars. Which is how we got to the moon.
When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go
into space on April 12, 1961, a wave of patriotic pride washed across the Soviet
Union—and panic engulfed America. The Soviets were winning the Cold War in
space.
President John F. Kennedy consulted the experts and set his sights on the
moon. In May, he asked Congress to fund the initiative, noting that the scale of
the project was so huge that “it will not be one man going to the moon … it will
be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.” Then he set about
selling the idea, asking Americans to be bold, think big to do something that had
never been done. Kennedy came into office “asking” the nation to think, not
about what the country could do for them but what they could do for their
country. Now he wanted them to think outside their planetary constraints. When
he spoke at Rice University in September 1962, observing that America had
always thought big, he posed a set of questions.
But why, some say, the moon?
Why choose this as our goal?
Why climb the highest mountain?
Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic?
We do these things, the young president famously said, not because they are
easy, but because they are hard.

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The brilliance of Kennedy’s questions—which were a hallmark not just of
the moon shot but so much of his Camelot presidency—was in their ability to
appeal to the country’s imagination, greatness, and sense of destiny. They asked
Americans to rise to a challenge, to look to the future and to answer a higher
calling.
The response was hardly unanimous. The Apollo mission was brave and
brilliant, but according to Gallup polls conducted before the landing, it never
enjoyed majority public support until the day the lunar module actually touched
down on the surface of the moon. But when the time came, one out of every
seven people on the planet watched the moon landing on TV. I was a kid at
summer camp and listened on a battery-operated transistor radio as Neil
Armstrong set foot on lunar soil and took his one step for humanity and read
from a plaque on the leg of the Eagle Lander, “Here men from planet Earth first
set foot on the moon … we came in peace for all mankind.” On that magical day,
July 20, 1969, we rose to an extraordinary challenge and answered Kennedy’s
questions in a way that captivated the planet.
Travel in Time
When we ask people to time travel—to fast-forward themselves to another place,
another time—we issue a ticket to creative thinking. There are few moments in
human history that rival the mission to the moon, but we envision the future
every day. It’s how we set our sights and articulate ambitious goals.
When I started my term as a trustee for my alma mater, Middlebury College,
the president was in the early stages of crafting a ten-year strategic plan. At our
fall retreat, a facilitator started with a question that invited us to think creatively
about the college’s future by going there.
“It is ten years from now,” he said, “and the latest college rankings have just
come out. This school is at the top of the list. What are we doing?”
He put the future in the present tense. His question was a time machine.
Once we stepped inside, the obstacles that often interfere with big ideas—
practical considerations like cost, resources, staffing, and economics—fell away.
We traveled past them and arrived at our destination, where we were the best. In
our very own virtual reality, we looked around and listed the qualities that
earned us the top spot. There was a new science center, a new library, more
students who brought more diversity, more faculty, and more funding. The
future was clear!

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Everyone played. Then we worked backward to determine how to make it
happen, from program design to funding. Today, the college has a beautiful
science center and library. There are more students and more faculty. The school
is in the top ranks of liberal arts colleges. We did it. Imagined reality became
actual reality.
Since that retreat, I have used this technique many times, asking people to
time travel to visit the future and see it for themselves. Imagine. It’s five years in
the future. Your business has moved from number twelve in the marketplace to
number three.