Stephen Shapiro shows how overly specific questions kill creativity. NASA's laundry challenge got nowhere with a narrow washing-machine brief, but broader questions like 'How do we keep clothes clean?' opened entirely new solution spaces, from antimicrobials to material science.
Chapters
We are in the ask part of my fast innovation model. We've talked about the Goldilocks principle and we talked about examples of where the questions were too abstract, they were too fluffy and invited a lot of noise and why asking for ideas is a bad idea. Today I want to talk about the flip side, which is where questions might be too specific. And I want to go to an example that comes from NASA. NASA's done some fascinating innovations over the years, of course, I mean, they are amazing. And one of the things which they wanted to do is they wanted to be able to run what they call the zero Gravity Laundry system challenge. Because if you take your washing machine here on Earth and bring it up to space, well, you got a bit of a problem because our washing machines rely on gravity. So they ran this thing called the zero Gravity Laundry system challenge. It didn't work quite exactly the way that they had hoped, didn't get any solutions. And if you come back to the Goldilocks principle, that was probably too specific, too detailed, it was a solution masquerading is a question, it was a past based answer, a washing machine. But really the question is, if you use the Goldilocks principle, what would be just right? Well, if you start asking the question, how do we get clothes clean? Well, we move away from pumps and valves to cleaning solutions and things of that nature. Very, very different range of answers. But you could take it a step further. You could change one question, one word in the question. Instead of having, how do we get clothes clean? You could ask, how do we keep clothes clean? And now that opens up a different array of different solutions, moving from cleaning solutions, which is getting clothes clean, to a material science problem of antimicrobials. How do we keep clothes clean? Different questions will lead to different solutions and in some cases, you can change just one word to get a fundamentally different answer.
