Stephen Shapiro shows how rephrasing a question unlocks solutions. In a 65-team tournament, asking 'how many games to eliminate all losers?' instead of 'how many games to determine the champion?' makes the answer obvious: 64. The way you frame a problem shapes whether you can solve it.
Chapters
Einstein once said, if I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem, 1 minute finding solutions. 59 minutes defining the problem, 1 minutes finding solutions. From my experience, most organizations are running around spending 60 minutes on things that don't matter. So we need to. First and foremost when it comes to innovation is we need to become masterful at asking better questions. We need to ask better questions. Not just questions, but better questions. We want to ask the right question the right way. And I'm going to do a quick experiment here. Quick experiment. And I want you for a moment, and I'm not looking for you to shout out the answer, but when you know the answer to this question with 100% certainty, raise your hand and you can use paper and pencil to help you figure this thing out, because that does help a lot. So I want you to imagine a sports tournament for a moment. So in the United States, we have, every year, the NCAA tournament. The NCAA tournament is where they have 65 college basketball teams competing against one another. So imagine we have this sports tournament with 65 teams. And the way it works in this tournament is that the winner advances to the next round while the loser is eliminated. They'll call this single elimination. So you win, you get to go to the next round. You lose, you're out. In this particular model, because there's an odd number of teams, somebody needs to get into the game first. So we're going to give them a buy. We're going to actually let them in that first round. And again, if you want to look at the way that the NCAA Tournament operates, or any sports tournament that operates as a single elimination, it looks something pretty much like this. Now, this is not all of the 65 teams competing. This is just a subset. So the question is, how many games need to be played in order to determine which team is the champion? When you know the answer, raise your hand with 100% certainty. So I see 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5. Don't worry, I'm not going to wait for all the hands to go up because a lot of you aren't fast enough with a drawing or you can't count fast enough. You're drawing off these charts trying to figure it out. So here's the thing. I'm going to phrase the question a different way. I'm going to phrase the question a different way. So instead of asking how many games need to be played in order to determine which team is the champion, I'm going to ask the question, how many games need to be played in order to eliminate all of the losers. Well, if you have 65 teams competing, how many teams lose? How many games need to be played? 64. Because if someone is eliminated each time you play, you will get to the final answer. Now, if you were to actually draw off the brackets, you will see that it is, in fact, 64 games. That is what it is. The way you phrase a problem will lead you down the path to a particular answer. The way you phrase a problem will lead you down the path to a particular answer. And this is really important because we often are either asking the wrong problem or we're asking the right problem the wrong way.
