Crafting Questions to Make Better Decisions

by Ozan Varol

Using Smart Questions to Get Better Answers

Using smart questions to get better answers from Crafting Questions to Make Better Decisions by Ozan Varol

The Power of Divergent Thinking

Imagine a glass bottle with its base pointed toward a light. Now, if you put a half a dozen bees and flies into the bottle, which species would find its way out first? Now, most people assume the answer is bees. After all, bees are known for their intelligence, but when it comes to finding their way out of the bottle, the bees' intelligence actually gets in their way. Because the bees love the light, they'll keep bumping up against the base of the bottle located at the light source until they die. In contrast, the flies disregard the light. They just bounce around the bottle until they stumble on the opening that restores their liberty. The flies and the bees respectively represents what's known as divergent and convergent thinking. The flies are the divergent thinkers, fluttering freely until they find the exit. The bees, on the other hand, are the convergent thinkers zeroing in on the seemingly most obvious exit path with a behavior that's ultimately their undoing. Divergent thinking is a way of generating different ideas in an open-minded and free-flowing manner, like flies bouncing around in a glass bottle. During divergent thinking, we don't think about constraints, possibilities, or budgets. We set aside the spreadsheets and let our brain run wild, open to whatever might present itself. Research shows that divergent thinking is a portal to creativity. It boosts people's ability to discover innovative solutions and make new associations. Now it's tempting to skip divergent thinking and instead resort to convergent thinking. Evaluate what's easy, what's probable, what's doable, but convergent thinking by itself is dangerous because it stops idea generation before it even begins. We've all been in that meeting before. People are gathered around the conference table with half empty cups of lukewarm coffee strewn around to brainstorm ideas and explore options. But instead of exploring ideas, everybody's busy shooting them down. We've tried that before. We don't have the budgets. The management would never approve. As a result, instead of trying something new, we end up doing what we did yesterday. So if you're a leader or manager leading a meeting or a brainstorming session, I encourage you to resist the tendency to immediately activate convergent thinking through a this can't be done attitude. Instead, encourage a mindset that says this could be done if. Allow people to explore all possibilities without prematurely eliminating them. Once you've activated the idealism of divergent thinking, you can follow it with the pragmatism of convergent thinking. In other words, you should cycle between a fly mindset and a bee mindset, but you've got to do things in the right order. We have to generate ideas first before we begin evaluating and eliminating them. If we cut the accumulation process short, if we immediately start thinking about consequences, we run the risk of hampering originality.

From First Principles to Questioning Outdated Assumptions

The phrase sticker shock isn't in the vocabulary of most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but that's what Elon Musk experienced as he shopped for rockets to send a spacecraft to Mars. The price tag was astronomical. As wealthy as Musk was, the cost of the rockets made it too expensive for him to start a space company. Just when he was about to give up, he realized that his approach was flawed. In trying to buy rockets that others had built, he wasn't reasoning from first principles. First principles thinking is a way of questioning all assumptions in a product or a system until you're left with the fundamental components. You let go of everything except what is essential. Everything else is negotiable. So for Musk, using first principles meant starting with the laws of physics and asking himself, "What's required to launch a rocket?" He stripped a rocket down to its smallest sub-components, its fundamental raw materials. "What is a rocket made of?" He asked himself, and then he asked, "What did those materials cost on the commodity market?" And it turns out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2% of the typical price. So instead of buying rockets that other people built, he decided to cut his own mill and construct his next-generation rockets from scratch at a tiny fraction of the price. First principles thinking prompted SpaceX to question another deeply held assumption in rocket science. For decades, most rockets that launched spacecraft into outer space couldn't be reused. They would plunge into the ocean or burn up in the atmosphere after carrying their cargo to orbit requiring an entirely new rocket to be built. Now imagine setting an airplane on fire at the end of each flight. The cost of a modern rocket is about the same as a Boeing 737, but flying on a 737 is far less expensive because jets, unlike like rockets, are flown over and over again. SpaceX decided to change that by creating reusable rockets. Since then, the company has been refurbishing and reusing numerous recovered rocket stages, sending them back out to space like certified pre-owned cars. These innovations have drastically cut the cost of space flight. "Your assumptions are your windows on the world," said Alan Alda. "Scrub them off every once in a while, "or the light won't come in." Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday's troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact, if we don't question it, process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures. Now escaping our own assumptions is tricky business, particularly when they're invisible to us. So over to you, which unnecessary relic of the past clouds your thinking and hampers your progress? What do you assume you're supposed to do simply because you've done it before or simply because everyone around you is doing it? Can you question that assumption and replace it with something better? Its through returning to first principles by cutting the assumptions and processes cluttering your thinking that you can reimagine the status quo.

Why breakthroughs arrive from outside your industry

Back in 1997 before he co-founded Netflix, Reed Hastings was a software developer. He had racked up a bunch of late fees when he misplaced a copy of Apollo 13 that he had rented from a video store. After he found the missing cassettes, he dropped it off at his local Blockbuster, along with a $40 late fee on his way to the gym. Now in the middle of his workout, Hastings had an epiphany. His gym, like most other gyms, use a subscription model. You could pay 30 or $40 a month and workout as little or as much as you he recalls. And that epiphany was the seed that created Netflix. Hastings took a concept, the subscription model, from a completely unrelated field and applied it to video rentals to create one of the most lucrative businesses of all time. Surgeon Atul Gawande applied aviation's preflight checklist to make surgery safer and less prone to human error. Ultimately, that measure cut surgical complications in half and continues to save tens of thousands of lives every year. Larry Page and Sergey Brin adopted an idea from academia, the frequency of citations to an academic paper indicates its popularity and applied it to the search engine to create Google. As these examples show, what's commonplace in one industry can revolutionize another. Cross-pollination of ideas from different industries is responsible for scores of humanity's great innovations. Now, in most cases, the fit won't be perfect, but the mere act of comparing and combining ideas across industries will spark new lines of thinking. So the next time you find yourself in a jam, don't search for answers in all the conventional places. Instead ask yourself, what other industry has faced this problem before? What other seemingly unrelated fields can I borrow inspiration from? To learn about unrelated fields, pick up a magazine or a book about a subject you know nothing about. Attend a different industry's conference. Surround yourself with people from different professions, backgrounds, and interests. Instead of talking about the weather and repeating other small talk platitudes, ask, what's the most interesting thing you're working on right now? Because it's only in the unconventional places that you'll find the connections that others can't see.