A More Beautiful Question (19 page)

Nanda worked through all of those issues, launched her business, Nanda Home, in 2006, and sold more than a half million units of the Clocky over the next three years. While the product originated with Nanda’s connective-inquiry skills and her willingness to ask What If, it would never have come into existence if Nanda hadn’t taken that far-out idea and turned it, step by step, into a practical reality.

The How stage of questioning is where the rubber meets the road or, in Nanda’s case, the clock hits the floor. It’s the point at which things come together and then, more often than not, fall apart, repeatedly. Reality intrudes and nothing goes quite as planned. To say it’s the hard part of questioning is not to suggest it’s easy to challenge assumptions by asking Why, or to envision new possibilities by asking What If. Those require difficult backward steps and leaps of imagination. But How tends to be more of a slow and difficult march, marked by failures that are likely to be beneficial—but don’t necessarily seem that way at the time.

One of the difficult early challenges at this stage is to make a commitment to one idea. At the wide-open What If stage of inquiry, one tends to ask many questions, to explore multiple possibilities—from practical to far-out ideas. But when it comes time to act on an idea, you have to narrow possibilities and converge on the one deemed worthy of being taken to the next level.

In committing to an idea, it becomes critical to find a way to share it in order to get feedback. We all have ideas that live in our own head and never go beyond that. Even just by telling other people about a question you’re working on, you’ve begun to form a commitment. “The important thing about telling everyone
⁵⁸
your idea is that it puts you on the hook for following through, because you’re going to look foolish if you do nothing,” observed the designer Sam Potts.

Nanda did this simply by asking those friends,
What would you think of an alarm clock on wheels—would you ever want something like that?
That kind of verbal pitch is useful up to a point. But you haven’t really committed to an idea until you’ve given actual form to it. The question or idea must be made tangible and shareable—the better to be considered, passed around, perhaps tested in some way.

The most basic way to give form to an idea is to put it on paper (Nanda created rough sketches of what a Clocky might look like before she started building). Depending on the idea, putting it in writing—a summary, a proposal—may be sufficient, but keep in mind that visuals have great power. “If you want everyone to have
⁵⁹
the same mental model of a problem, the fastest way to do it is with a picture,” according to the visualization expert David Sibbet.

That image could be drawn on the back of a napkin, or on an iPad using various available sketch programs, or with stock art off the Internet. As the representation of an idea becomes more complex—a test website, say, or a three-dimensional early model of a product (such as Nanda’s shag-carpeted clock)—it moves into the
prototype
stage.

That’s an overly technical term for something that can be done by anyone, in almost any endeavor. A prototype could be a short YouTube video that serves as the first step in making a film; it could be a pilot program or a trial run; a rudimentary model that may be taped or glued together; a sophisticated 3-D rendering using computer-aided design software; or just about anything that can be made to represent an idea in a preliminary form. The IDEO designer Diego Rodriguez once remarked, “A prototype is a question, embodied.”
⁶⁰
Given a body, the question becomes harder to ignore. Nanda’s question—
What if a clock had wheels?
—became much more compelling to people when they actually saw a clock with wheels.

How might we roll it instead of lugging it?
⁶²

The question
What if we put wheels on it?
has been the basis of countless “smart recombinations.” For example in 1970 Bernard Sadow, a luggage company executive, was dragging two heavy suitcases through an airport when he noticed workers easily transporting a large machine on a wheeled skid. Sadow wondered,
What if I put wheels on these suitcases?
That led to a protracted How stage, which began with Sadow attaching four wheels to a suitcase laid flat—providing a way to drag one’s bags. But that idea was later improved by an airline pilot, Robert Plath, who thought of using a long upright handle to pull a suitcase propped up on two wheels (instead of laying flat on four). The end result of all that questioning by Sadow and Plath: the now-ubiquitous Rollaboard suitcase.

Technology has made it much easier to create prototypes quickly, inexpensively, in all shapes and forms. (This book started with a prototype: a blog called A More Beautiful Question, which began to advance some of the ideas of the book and solicited feedback from readers.) Some programs now can turn anyone into a sketch artist or website designer; more advanced software also allows users now to create highly sophisticated models that can be tested in all kinds of what-if scenarios (so that, for example, a digital prototype of a building can be subjected to simulated earthquake-level stress, to see how the building would hold up).

The possibilities for prototyping will be greatly expanded as 3-D printing becomes widely available and affordable over the next few years. The technology, which makes it easy to sketch an idea for an object on a computer screen and then manufacture a physical version (usually made of plastic or steel), is “enabling a class of ordinary people
⁶¹
to take their ideas and turn those into physical, real products,” according to J. Paul Grayson, chief executive of the design-software company Alibre. It provides just one more way to bring our questions into the physical world.

Still, technology doesn’t necessarily ease the trepidation many people feel about going public with ideas—particularly at the rough, early stages. As the writer Peter Sims noted in
⁶³
Harvard Business Review
, most of us, throughout our school years and even in the business world, have been taught to hold back ideas until they are polished and perfect. That tendency toward overthinking and excessively preparing, rather than quickly trying out ideas to get feedback and to see what works and doesn’t, is a behavior that becomes ingrained over time.

But it’s not the natural, instinctive way of exploring and creating. If you look at the way children act on their questions and ideas, you see a much better example of how to move quickly and fearlessly from What If to How.

How do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse (even after you put the marshmallow on top)?

A software designer shared a story about an interesting experiment in which the organizers brought together a group of kindergarten children who were divided into small teams and given a challenge: Using uncooked spaghetti sticks, string, tape, and a marshmallow, they had to assemble the tallest structure they could, within a time limit (the marshmallow was supposed to be placed on top of the completed structure).

Then, in a second phase of the experiment, the organizers added a new wrinkle. They brought in teams of Harvard MBA grad students to compete in this challenge against the kindergartners. The grad students, I’m told, took it seriously. They brought a highly analytical approach to the challenge, debating among themselves about how best to combine the sticks, the string, and the tape to achieve maximum altitude.

Perhaps you’ll have guessed this already, but the MBA students were no match for the kindergartners. For all their planning and discussion, the structures they carefully conceived and constructed invariably fell apart—and then they were out of time before they could get in more attempts. (I was told by my friend that the MBA grads also spent too much of their time arguing about who should be in charge.)

The kids used their time much more efficiently by constructing right away. They tried one way of building, and if it didn’t work, they quickly tried another. They got in a lot more tries. They learned from their mistakes as they went along, instead of attempting to figure out everything in advance.

The point of the marshmallow experiment was not to humble MBA students (if anything, that was a side benefit), but rather to better understand how to make progress when tasked with a difficult challenge in uncertain conditions. What we learn from those kids is that there’s no substitute for quickly trying things out to see what works.

Looking at this through the questioning prism: The MBA students got stuck too long contemplating the possible What Ifs, while the kids moved quickly from What If to How. As soon as they thought of a possible combination, they tried it to see how it would work.

So
what does an offbeat test involving marshmallows and kindergartners mean to those of us operating in the real world?
One way to think about it is that in today’s increasingly dynamic environment, we’re all being challenged (or will soon be) to take some version of the marshmallow test: we’ll be expected to quickly adapt to using new and unfamiliar tools, as we try to construct new businesses, new markets, new careers, new life plans—using ever-changing technology, without clear instructions, and with the clock ticking. All of which requires people to be not only better questioners, but better experimenters.

When you take a look at how adults in innovative environments work, they tend to operate much like the kids in the marshmallow test. At IDEO, the firm’s designers quickly move from coming up with ideas to building and testing those ideas. The same is true at MIT Media Lab, where, as the director Joi Ito explains, the researchers and students don’t spend a lot of time wondering about the questions they’re pursuing, or debating how best to proceed. They quickly start doing what you’re supposed to do in a lab—experimenting. As Ito puts it, “These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out
if
you should try them out.”

What Ito is doing in his lab is also happening at companies such as Google and Facebook, and throughout much of the tech industry worldwide. At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg has
⁶⁴
elevated the idea of quickly building and testing ideas to a sacred principle that Zuckerberg has described as the Hacker Way. In a letter to potential Facebook investors at the time of the company’s 2012 IPO, Zuckerberg explained that while the word
hacking
has some negative connotations, at Facebook it means “building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” This means constantly trying out new ideas in rough form. “Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once . . . Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works.”

The rapid test-and-learn approach has caught on throughout the entrepreneurial world, fueled in part by Eric Ries’s Lean Startup phenomenon. Ries maintains that entrepreneurs, existing companies—or anyone trying to create something new and innovative—must find ways to constantly experiment and quickly put new ideas out into the world for public consumption, rather than devoting extensive resources and time to trying to perfect ideas behind closed doors. Ries urges businesses to focus on developing what he calls “minimum viable products”—in effect, quick, imperfect test versions of ideas that can be put out into the marketplace in order to learn what works and what doesn’t.

But this is more than a business strategy. The basic principles of the test-and-learn approach apply in almost any situation where people are trying to solve problems in dynamic, uncertain conditions.

How do you make a hard-boiled egg’s shell disappear?
⁶⁶

The household kitchen is a hotbed for innovative questioning—both by professional kitchenware designers and inquisitive homemakers simply asking,
Why is this chore done this particular way?
and
How might it be done better?
For Betsy Ravreby Kaufman the task in question involved making deviled eggs for parties: Kaufman hated the drudgery of egg-peeling as well as having to throw away eggs due to stuck shells or gouges. Standing over a boiling pot of eggs, she thought,
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could hard-boil an egg and not have shells to peel?
Which then morphed to,
What if you could boil an egg in a hard-boiled egg shape,
but with the shell off?
She pitched her idea to Edison Nation, which backs invention ideas, and a year later a plastic “hard boiled egg system” called Eggies could be found not just in Kaufman’s kitchen, but on store shelves, as well.

For example, New York City under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg used test-and-learn pilot programs on everything from creating more pedestrian areas to implementing bike-rental programs to setting up a citywide 311 phone call-in system for providing information to residents. Bloomberg’s administration was adept at bringing about change by tackling basic Why questions; Bloomberg acted as a kind of “pilot program mayor.” It made it more possible to enact large-scale change—because if a pilot program wasn’t panning out, it was easier to adjust it or just scrap it without having invested in full implementation.