Stephen Shapiro argues that asking better questions matters more than rushing to answers. He offers 25 lenses for reframing problems across business, organizational, and personal challenges, organized to help practitioners and innovation leaders define what they're actually trying to solve.
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Large corporations face an endless sea of challenges. How can we avoid becoming a commodity? How can we increase revenues? How can we decrease costs? How can we make sure we are not disrupted by new technologies? Small business owners, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs also face a long list of challenges. How can we maintain better work life balance? How can we deal with larger competitors that have more money and resources? How can we meet payroll each month? How can we differentiate our business? Even life hands us personal challenges? How can we feed our families after losing our jobs? How can we find new jobs? How can we choose where to live? How can we get promoted at work? When faced with these and myriad other challenges, we crave answers. That's a natural human instinct. But having answers is not the answer. Asking different and better questions is the key to finding better solutions. As you will see, the questions we ask affect the range of solutions we consider. Unfortunately, past experiences often influence the questions we ask. This can limit the potential of your business. If you are asking the wrong question, no matter how much time, money or energy you invest, you will never find the best answer. Do you want a thriving business that can grow faster than the competition? Do you want to stay relevant in the minds of your customers? Do you want a more powerful life? If so, you need to master the problem solving and the first step is to ask the right questions. How to Read this Book Although innovation has been my area of expertise for the past 25 years, this book focuses on problem definition, problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making. These concepts are critical components of innovation and applicable to all areas of business and every aspect of life. While most of the examples in this book are focused on business, the concepts we'll explore can also easily and effectively help you solve challenges in your personal life. I'm giving you an immensely valuable and highly practical tool. 25 lenses for problem formulation. That's 25 different ways to reframe any challenge you face. These lenses are designed to help you ask better questions that generate better solutions, ultimately leading to better results. This book is divided into three sections. Section 1 Ask Better Questions we'll explore why asking the right question is so important and why we are naturally wired to ask terrible ones. Section 225 lenses for reframing Problems this is the tool portion. I'll explain each of the lenses and guide you when and how to use them. Challenge Centered Innovation Leveraging well framed questions in your organization can create an efficient innovation engine. I'll show you how you can improve your return on investment by tenfold or more over traditional innovation methods. When you focus on solving challenges. This book is not intended to be read or listened to straight through cover to cover like a traditional business book, I suggest you read or listen to Section 1 first in order to fully understand the power of asking better questions. After that, you have a couple of options. 1. If you are business leader or part of an innovation team looking to improve roi, you might want to skip section two and go straight to section three. Then you can circle back to section two and learn more about the lenses. Or two if you want to get started reframing challenges now, read or listen to section 2. Then start practicing with the lenses. My primary goal in writing this book is to help you solve nearly any business problem you might have. Although there are countless other books on problem solving, most only provide theory, not the necessary tools. And the tools they are providing typically focus on finding answers rather than asking better questions. As you will discover, finding solutions to the wrong problem is irrelevant. By changing the questions, you can uncover answers that were previously hidden from sight and the tool to help you reframe those questions and shine a light on invisible solutions are the 25 lenses SA.
