A More Beautiful Question (24 page)

With so much fresh-baked bread in so many outlets, Panera has always been “uniquely able” to provide leftover bread to people in need—and the company has, for years, been a contributor to community food pantries. But there’s a difference between donating to charity (something many companies do, almost by rote), and fully committing to a cause. “We started asking ourselves,
What more can we do?
” Shaich says. “I felt like, I want to put our bodies on the line.” What gradually became clear was that Panera could provide not just bread giveaways, but a more complete dining experience for those going hungry. That extra level of involvement—“putting bodies on the line,” to use Shaich’s words—made the effort bigger and more distinctive than a standard corporate charity program.

The first Panera Cares café opened about two years ago. Now, the five cafés around the country serve over a million people a year (and for the most part cover costs, as high donations from some customers tend to balance out lower ones by others).

Shaich notes that as the company was developing the Panera Cares idea and putting it into practice (with the CEO himself working at the first café), a number of tough choices were made to ensure the integrity of the program: offering a full menu instead of a limited one, using donation boxes at the cafés instead of cash registers (Shaich was concerned that the latter could create psychological pressure on customers to pay). At each step, Shaich says, the company had to ask,
Do we want to take a shortcut on this or do it right?

As Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie observes, being true to a cause often requires making tough decisions and sacrificing at times. “When you come to the point where you can’t serve both the bottom line and the cause, one or the other must suffer,” says Ogilvie, pointing to the Whole Foods supermarket chain, which stopped selling live lobsters for an extended time until it found a supplier that did humane harvesting. “Those are hard choices, but when you opt for the cause over the bottom line, employees can see that, and then they believe in the company and the cause even more.”

One of the challenges for marketers in becoming a cause is that while they may be used to saying they’re “for” certain things, they rarely go the other way and ask themselves,
What are we against?
As part of its stand against excess consumerism, Patagonia went out on a limb when it considered:

What if we asked people
not
to buy from us?

The company decided it was willing to risk losing sales in support of a larger cause and ran ads urging people
not
to buy its clothing (or at least, not to buy a new jacket if they didn’t actually need it). Says Patagonia’s Sheahan, “Those ads were just asking people to question their consumerism and maybe be a little more mindful about the stuff they’re purchasing.” Still, it was a high-risk message, though Sheahan says it actually helped the brand gain market share by attracting more customers—who presumably admired the stand Patagonia was taking with the ads.

How can we make a better experiment?

Questioning also has an important role in everyday business matters such as product development. As Lean Startup’s Eric Ries points out, it is central to testing out new ideas to see what works.

Ries believes one of the most
²¹
important questions businesses need to ask today is the one above. It’s somewhat counterintuitive for most managers—who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.”

So
how do companies get better at experimenting?
Ries says you start with the acknowledgment that “we
are
operating amid all this uncertainty—and that the purpose of building a product or doing any other activity is to create an experiment to reduce that uncertainty.” This means that instead of asking
What will we do?
or
What will we build?
the emphasis should be on
What will we learn?
“And then you work backwards to the simplest possible thing—the minimum viable product—that can get you the learning,” he says.

What is your tennis ball?
(and other entrepreneurial questions)
²⁰

Drew Houston, founder of the online storage service Dropbox, thinks all would-be entrepreneurs should try to answer the above question. “The most successful people are obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them,” according to Houston. “They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball.” To enhance your prospects, “find your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.” PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel believes entrepreneurs can find ideas to pursue by asking themselves,
What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on?
If self-examination doesn’t work, try looking around: Brian Spaly, a serial entrepreneur in the apparel industry, advises, “Whenever you encounter a service or customer experience that frustrates you, ask,
Is this a problem I could solve?
” Lastly, don’t just focus on the mercenary question
Will consumers pay for this?
The startup business coach Dave Kashen thinks the better question to ask about any new venture is,
Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better?

Just this one change—before you get to any of the more complex Lean Startup methodology—can make a world of difference, Ries insists. For one thing, it can help unlock the creativity that’s already there in your company. “Most companies are full of ideas, but they don’t know how to go about finding out if those ideas work,” Ries says. “If you want to harvest all those ideas, allow employees to experiment more—so they can find out the answers to their questions themselves.”

Peer Insight’s Tim Ogilvie points out that it’s also important for companies to give people a safe place to test ideas and run experiments. To that end, he says, companies need to be able to answer:

Where is our petri dish?

That question is really asking,
Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions?
“As an established business,” Ogilvie says, “you’ve got all these promises you’re keeping to your current customers—you have to stay focused on that. But that may not have a future.” So the question becomes “
Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?”

Company leadership needs to “provide permission and protocols for experimentation,” he says. That means providing the time and resources for people to explore new questions, as well as establishing methods: “How might we?” questioning sessions, ethnography, in-market experimentation. It can also mean cordoning off this area of the business—although a clear line of visibility should remain between the core business and the “petri dish” part of the company, so that each can influence the other.

Ogilvie says that yet another way to phrase this question is
Where is the place we can be a start-up again?
Surprisingly, he thinks it’s a question that even start-ups should ask themselves. “Start-ups are so desperate not to be a start-up,” says Ogilvie (himself a former start-up CEO). “They’re so anxious to be postrevenue and postprofit that you can almost give up what’s great about being a start-up too soon. They get built for execution, and once they’re having success, they’ll very quickly start thinking, ‘We’ve got to stick to our knitting.’” All of which means they’ve outgrown their original petri dish—and might need a new one.

If we brainstorm in questions, will lightning strike?

In the business world these days,
²²
brainstorming has a mixed reputation. Increasingly, it’s understood that people tend to do their best creative thinking—particularly in coming up with fresh insights and random associations by way of connective inquiry—in informal, relaxed settings, when they’re not really trying.

A brainstorming session runs counter to that: Everyone is stuck in a room trying desperately to come up with original ideas. “There is too much pressure and
²³
too much influence from others in the group,” according to Debra Kaye, author of the book
Red Thread Thinking
. “The free association done in brainstorming sessions is often shackled by peer pressure and as a result generates obvious responses.”

But many businesses are reluctant to walk away from brainstorming because they recognize the critical importance of being able to tackle challenges as a group. Collaborative thinking in problem solving is essential because it brings together multiple viewpoints and diverse backgrounds. While it’s understood that creativity sometimes requires solitude (“Be alone, that is when ideas are born,” Nikola Tesla said), we also know that it flourishes when diverse ideas and thoughts are exchanged.

One solution to this conundrum may be to shift the nature of brainstorming so that it’s about generating questions instead of ideas. Interesting findings about this are coming from a number of groups and individuals, working in both the education and business sectors.

The Right Question Institute—which specializes in teaching students to tackle problems by generating questions, not solutions—has found that groups of students (whether children or adults) seem to think more freely and creatively using the “question-storming” method, in which the focus is on generating questions. The RQI’s Dan Rothstein believes that some of the peer pressure in conventional brainstorming is lessened in this format. Answers tend to be judged more harshly than questions.

In the business world, Hal Gregersen has been studying the
²⁴
effectiveness of question-storming at major corporations and has found it to be far more effective than conventional brainstorming. “Regular brainstorming for ideas often hits a wall because we only have so many ideas,” Gregersen says. “Part of the reason we hit that wall is we’re asking the wrong questions.” When people in a group are struggling with an issue and find “they’re getting nowhere, they’re stuck,” Gregersen says, “that’s the perfect point to step back and do question-storming.”

Gregersen will typically advise group members to try to generate at least fifty questions about the problem that’s being “stormed.” As those questions are being written down for everyone to see, “other team members are paying attention and thinking of a better question.” It’s usually easier to come up with questions than ideas; we don’t have to divine a solution from the air or connect ideas in a fantastically original manner; we just have to come at the problem from a slightly different angle of inquiry.

After observing about a hundred Q-storm sessions around the world, Gregersen has noted some patterns. “At around twenty-five questions, the group may stall briefly and say, ‘That’s enough questions.’ But if you push on beyond that point, some of the best questions come as you get to fifty or even seventy-five.”

The RQI approach to question-storming focuses less on volume and moves more quickly to “improving” the questions generated by the group, by opening closed questions and closing open ones. The key is to converge around the best questions, as decided through group discussion. This gets to one of the big problems with brainstorming in general: Many ideas are tossed out, but the groups often don’t know how to winnow down to the best ideas. It can be easier to winnow down questions because the best questions are magnetic—they intrigue people, make them want to work more on those. RQI recommends coming out of a session with three great questions that you want to explore further.

Question-storming can be more realistic and achievable than brainstorming. Instead of hoping that you’ll emerge from a meeting with “the answer” (which almost never happens and thus leaves people feeling frustrated), the goal is to come out of it with a few promising and powerful questions—which is likely to provide a sense of direction and momentum.

As I was examining the ways some of today’s cutting-edge companies are trying to reinvent brainstorming, an interesting trend surfaced: a specific form of questioning using three words—
How might we?
It’s a simple
²⁵
way of ensuring that would-be innovators are asking the right questions and using the best wording. Proponents of this practice say it is surprisingly effective—and a testament to the importance of wording a question just right to spark creative thinking and freewheeling collaboration.

When people within companies try to innovate, they often talk about the challenges they’re facing by using language that can inhibit creativity instead of encouraging it, says the business consultant Min Basadur, who has taught the
How might we?
(HMW) form of questioning to a wide range of companies over the past four decades. Basadur explains. “People may start out asking, ‘How
can
we do this?’ or ‘How
should
we do that?’ But as soon as you start using words like
can
and
should
, you’re implying judgment: Can we really do it? And should we?” By substituting the word
might
, he says, “You’re able to defer judgment, which helps people to create options more freely and opens up more possibilities.”