Stephen Shapiro argues that innovation comes from asking better questions, not generating more ideas. He uses an airport baggage example where reframing the problem from "speed up bags" to "reduce wait time" led to slowing passengers instead, making the whole system more efficient.
Chapters
Don't think outside the box. Find a better box. The issue is not the expansiveness of your thinking. You're looking in the wrong place. We're moving from ideas to solutions. Everybody has an opinion, suggestion, or idea. It doesn't mean you want it. Is there a fundamentally different way we can look at at the problem? How do I stop the flow of oil? How do I solve world hunger? How do I increase revenues, margins, sales? Asking for ideas is a bad idea. If we ask abstract questions, we will only get abstract solutions. It takes 3,000 raw ideas to ultimately lead to one implemented solution. So that means you spent time working on 2,999 ideas that actually had no value in the long run. They realized that it took the bags eight to 10 minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. But at this particular airport, it only took the passengers one to three minutes to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. So instead of speeding up the bags, what do you think they did? They slowed down the passengers. They literally reconfigured the airport so it would take on average 8 to 10 minutes for the passengers to get from the plane to the baggage carousel. When they asked the passengers, are you now happy? They were ecstatic. We create inefficiencies if we're not solving the right problems and we're not solving them the right way. Big companies don't have an infinite amount of time, money, or resources. So it's impacting the bottom line, and it's taking their eye off the ball. They were asking the question, how do we speed up the bags? When in fact they should asking the question, how do we reduce wait time? If you spend your entire life trying to speed up bags, you will never think to slow down the passengers. If you focus on where you differentiate, you're creating incredible value. And if you focus on the framing of the challenges, you're going to accelerate things because you're asking better questions. We do not give enough power to the words in the language we use. The way we frame a question has a profound impact on the types of solutions we develop. So if you turn innovation into a repeatable and predictable process, now what we get is something where instead of it happening when somebody's inspired to innovate, it actually happens on a regular basis, and it allows us to create something where we can get a tenfold improvement on our innovation results compared to traditional methods. The reality is, it's not about the answers. Having all the answers is not the answer. It is about the question. Question. The questions you ask today will predict the future you have tomorrow.
