Stephen Shapiro explains why asking the right question matters more than collecting ideas. After the Deepwater Horizon spill dumped 180 million gallons into the Gulf over 87 days, a crowdsourcing call got 123,000 submissions but only a dozen had any value. The real solution came from reframing the problem itself.
Questions this video answers
April 20, 2010.
87 days.
180 million gallons.
123,000 submissions.
About a dozen.
Chapters
Today we move to the second part of my FAST model. If you remember correctly, FAST stands for focus, ask, shift, and test. Today we're going to talk about asking better questions as a means of getting better solutions. And I want to go back to April 20, 2010. On that day, the Deep Water Horizon oil rig exploded. Over the course of 87 days, 180 million gallons of crude oil pumped into the Gulf coast of the United States. After about seven different innovative ways to stop the flow of the oil, none of them which worked, they turned to something which a lot of people in the world of innovation have been turning to these days, which is crowdsourcing, asking crowds for solutions, ideas and questions. So they created a website and basically what it said is, we have a problem. Do you have a solution? And over the course of just a few weeks, they received 123,000 submissions. Now, on the face of this, this sounds like a great thing because people are concerned, they're passionate, they're engaged. But the big question is, of those 123,000, how many were deemed as having any value at all whatsoever? The answer is about a dozen. And. And none of those even had anything to do with the final solution. So if you think about it, that means that 99.99% of the time thinking about a problem, submitting the solution and evaluating those solutions was a waste of time. This is why I say asking for ideas is a bad idea. In the next installment, we will talk about how do we go from ideas to well framed questions where we look for solutions.
