Determine your central question and practice creative divergence

- Albert Einstein is reported to have said, "If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem, and one minute resolving it." That may be extreme but the importance of using an effective question cannot be overstated. Of course, there is no single correct question, but a useful question will be one that meets all of these criteria. It should build on existing mental models or areas you have explored with a hook of some sort while still challenging you to explore new horizons. That is, it must be somehow tied to something of relevance to your current boxes. It cannot be completely out there in every way, but it should also be somehow provocative or surprising. It should be vivid or visual in some way. That is not just how do we grow, or we need to cut costs 30%, but something more memorable and colorful. It often helps to include a character in some way. For example, if the goal is to improve marketing at the bank, building on trends relating to mobile technology with the target customer segment of professional women in their 20s instead of asking specifically about that, ask, "How do we persuade a 25-year-old female accountant in Los Angeles to make our bank's mobile app her most used app of the year?" It should be limited and constrained in some way so as to allow you to focus your thinking You are surely aware by now that we insist on a specific question and would never just say everything is on the table, or only think outside the box. And so rather than asking, "What should our strategy for entering the mortgage market be?" Your question could be more along the lines of, "How can we create a mortgage offering that appeals to the 25-year-old accountant in Los Angeles while remaining profitable?" It should be clear and understandable to someone coming in fresh. If an outsider joined your conversation a question like, "How can we build on our existing brand proposition for our desired customers while hitting our profit targets?" would not be as clear as the other examples. By using prospective approaches to investigate the world you can generate rich customer insights, competitive intelligence, and mega trends within you. These in turn can help you once again to see and understand things in front of you in new, illuminating ways. With this key inquiry in mind you can begin the process of divergence. Divergence can be done alone, but it generally yields a wider range of results, and hence is most effective if conducted with other people. There are a lot of ways to make that happen from a quick 10 minute exercise with a friend, to small informal lunches with a few colleagues, to more formal and lengthy workshops. We suggest you try to enjoy this part of the creative process in a setting that is physically, or at least psychologically, removed from your everyday work environment so that you're freed from the associations and distractions that it may hold for you. We encourage you to go to a place where you will feel at ease and if others are joining you a place where they will feel free to share the ideas they come up with regardless of their standing, or position within the organization. At the start of a session, whatever the size and format, you need a clear plan and a good sense of the expectations. If others are involved this plan should be clear to everyone. A good plan would include a view of how the ideas generated will be captured, and when divergence will shift to convergence. Remember and remind others as needed to focus on quantity for this phase, rather than quality. Generate as many ideas as possible, and everyone present should participate. If you've roped others into joining you, then you are responsible for helping them transcend their inhibitions and tendency to judge and analyze everything to allow for divergence to happen in a free and uninterrupted way. To paraphrase Linus Pauling, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." No single idea at its inception is inherently born good. Rather, to develop a winning new box, you first need to come up with many ideas and possibilities, and later revise them. During divergence no idea, as idiotic or inappropriate as it may seem to anyone, should be immediately rejected. Divergence is the time to give birth to many creative new boxes. If it is a group event it is critical that the facilitator, whether you or someone else who has been designated to be the neutral open-minded inspiring leader and coach, create an immediate sense of tolerance and inclusiveness so that no one will feel reluctant to share his or her thoughts and ideas. One of the key impediments to developing exciting new ideas is the phrase and the attitude summed up as, yes, but. The dialogue usually sounds something like this. "Hey boss, I have a great idea for a new approach to tinting the glass we use in the windows we're selling. We can create a new photo sensitive system so that the glass becomes darker and darker as the sun goes down and becomes opaque by nightfall." "Yes, I guess we could do that, but I don't know whether our budget would allow it." "Well, I found a budget item in our upcoming fiscal year that is more than sufficient to cover the cost of investigating this new approach." "Yes, but didn't the automotive division try something like that last year? I don't think the big boss would go for it." There is a time and place for convergent thinking, for making an acting upon practical decisions, but to ensure that you're giving the divergence phase enough time and room for success, we would encourage you to do your very best during this idea creation phase to use the supportive and enthusiastic, yes and, rather than the discouraging and often toxic, yes but. Here's the same dialogue rewritten to reflect the yes and approach. "Hey boss, I have a great idea for a new approach to tinting the glass we use in the windows we're selling. We can create a new photo sensitive system so that the glass becomes darker and darker as the sun goes down and becomes opaque by nightfall." "Yes, and maybe some models could provide both options so customers could use the photo sensitive tinting some days and on other days keep the glass clear." "Yes, and it could be interesting to develop it with additional options for places like Iceland, where some consumers might want to darken it when it's late at night, but still light outside." Yes and helps people build upon one another's ideas. Don't get us wrong. This is not about being gracious or politically correct by affirming every idea tossed your way. Rather, the yes and approach is useful during the divergence phase for a purely logical reason. It forces you to come up with lots of ideas and it helps the initial iteration of an idea be further developed. As Pablo Picasso once said, "An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought." Sometimes even what may at first seem like a very good idea may be impractical and require further iteration and development before it makes sense and becomes valuable. Good ideas emerge because you first come up with, and eventually discarded, a lot of other less good ones. Conducting divergence exercises. To begin to answer your central question, you'll want exercises that foster divergence. Ones that will be stimulating, but also appropriate for the specific sort of new boxes you're hoping to create, and any people you might be working with. The exercises that follow are some of our favorites and are intended to help you see your organization and what it does through a different lens. They are meant to provoke you, to have you consider the very opposite of what you've always thought to be true, and to help you make novel associations between topics, and contexts, and worlds that generally are thought to be completely distinct and separate from one another. There are a multitude of such divergence exercises which are generally designed to help you either change your perspective, and thus generate new ideas, models, and approaches, and/or develop new associations, comparisons, and analogies between and among your various boxes. Here are some divergence exercises to experiment with. Describe your company without using five key words. Imagine if the CEO of Bank of America made a presentation to the firm's board of directors and described the company without uttering the words, money, bank, checking, savings, or financial. Perhaps he'd say, "We help our customers organize and store their most important possession." Or something completely different. This exercise is particularly useful for developing a broad new box, such as a new overall strategic vision for your firm, because it forces you to abandon some of your most fundamental existing perceptions about your organization. It also pushes you to consider new ways of looking at aspects of what is currently true for your organization. So you can also use this exercise to fill in one or more of your boxes with new ideas and concepts. Break constraints. What are some of the constraints you identified early on? This exercise involves shattering some of these existing mental models, methodically and deliberately, and seeing what possibilities emerge. If you feel your company's different divisions operate in silos without enough cooperation what if a new chief collaboration officer were put into place? If your goal is to break into the emerging market for Navy ships, but you only have experience building sailboats, imagine a situation where the top Admiral in the Navy is talking excitedly about your new product to his senior staff two years hence. How did this happen? Imagine your company has disappeared. Do you remember Circuit City or The Sharper Image? What happened to Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns? Imagine that your organization no longer exists in say, 2025 and then speculate as to why, or how this happened. Most people normally look at the future by extrapolating from the present. This exercise forces you to imagine the future in a more creative way. Imagine the many fascinating responses you'd get if you asked 200 top executives at Microsoft to spend 30 minutes trying to explain why their company might not exist in 2025. How could your organization suddenly evaporate? Perhaps some mega trends you are considering played a role, or your marketing paradigm became irrelevant for some reason. Maybe your products or services were displaced by new technology, or a radical shift in consumer tastes. We use this exercise to help people stretch the boundaries of what seems possible, and by doing so expand the way they see their organization. It can be helpful in creating a big new box, as well as in developing various future oriented scenarios, through which to probe and hopefully fortify your existing strategies and other approaches.