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

What do you cut?
What do you do?
Were do you start?
The teams went to work, prioritizing and calculating, cutting staff and
expenses and page counts, looking for savings in paper quality and marketing.
They looked at circulation and administrative costs. Though this was just an
exercise, everyone played along and took it seriously.
Then came the twist. In a surprise move, Jay gave his editors their money
back. Every penny. But he told them to use the budget they’d cut just a few
minutes earlier as their new baseline. They could invest the money they had
“saved” in any way they wanted.
What will you build?
How will you invest?

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Their answers helped transform the company’s five newsstand magazines
and led to more National Magazine Awards than any of their rivals. The net
profit for the company doubled in two years.
Asking people to play a role and answer a series of questions or a challenge
catalyzes creative thought and innovation. The consulting firm McKinsey &
Company examined the best ways that businesses could use insights from
neuroscience to unleash creativity and innovative ideas in their employees.
McKinsey cited the work of neuroscientist Gregory Berns from Emory
University, who found that creativity requires “bombarding” our brains with
things that are new, unfamiliar, and different.
The McKinsey authors stated, “only by forcing our brains to recategorize
information and move beyond our habitual thinking patterns can we begin to
imagine truly novel alternatives.” They cited a Harvard Business Review article
in which professors Clayton Christensen, Jeffrey Dyer, and Hal Gregersen list
five “discovery” skills for innovators: associating, questioning, observing,
experimenting, and networking. They found that making connections across
“seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas” was the most effective path
to innovation and that analogies—comparing one company to another, just as
Kennedy compared Apollo to Lindberg and as the Uber boys created a
comparison between a taxi and a millionaire’s limousine—led the teams to
“make considerable creative progress.”
They provided some sample questions that businesses could use in a
brainstorming session, asking what the best in the business would do in their
shoes, drawing comparisons that most closely applied to their own challenges.
After all, creativity questions should be aspirational.
How would Google manage our data?
How might Disney engage with our consumers?
How could Southwest Airlines cut our costs?
How would Zara redesign our supply chain?
Pushing people out of their “habitual thinking patterns” is an exercise anyone
can do. Imagine that your daughter just won a full-freight scholarship to any
school in the world. Ask her:
Where would she go?
What would she study?

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What opportunities would she have?
Or imagine you were named CEO of your company.
What would be the first things you would do to improve morale and
performance?
Role-playing puts people, like Ed’s actors, in an imaginary place and asks
them to play their part. The exercise works because, often without realizing it,
players combine imagination with intellect and get into the game. They think in
a hypothetical space and craft their responses to keep up with a storyline they
cannot control or predict.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, I ran an exercise with about two dozen
governors from across the country. They sat around a big horseshoe-shaped
table. They knew the stakes and they were up for the game. My job was to steer
them through the scenario to test response and readiness. I opened with a video
“news report” of an attack on a shopping mall. Early reports indicated many
casualties. Emergency responders were on the scene, but it was a confusing,
chaotic situation. Cable news and local TV channels had scrambled trucks,
cameras, and crews. The “experts” speculated. Several of them predicted more
attacks. I put the governors in the middle of this situation and asked them to
envision the scene and their response.