Solve problems better: Ask questions first, think of ideas later. You must first understand the problem before you can create a solution. I had never really understood this, as I always had an abundance of ideas. As a result, I’d scan the situation, come up with an idea and start to implement it. As one does. Right?
Except that, if I am brutally honest, many of my results have not matched my ambitions for the project. This has mostly happened because I was almost always unclear as to what the nature of the situation really was … I was simply following my heart (or my gut, or my nose).
I don’t like the idea of clarifying … people who ask loads of questions always seem nit-picky and critical to me. ‘Why can’t we just get to the ideas and then to the doing part?’, I always wonder.
And if you look around, you can see that people in positions of all kinds make a similar mistake. There are so often disconnects between the products or solutions being offered, and the reality of the situation the customer is in.
For a creative this represents a bit of a bind because, as the myth states, we’re just a bunch of dreamers coming up with fantabulous ideas. Ideas are worth nothing without action. And if you dump a lot of action into an idea that isn’t aligned to the true nature of the problem you are trying to solve … things go wrong.
Coming up with ideas is most easily explained as a process of joining dots … we join new pieces of information to existing information in our heads, look for connections or patterns and, on the basis of that, posit new realities or actions.
In short, a constant stream of good ideas requires a constant stream of ‘dots ‘or information. Aside from the reality check of first clarifying a situation before coming up with ideas for solutions, this step in problem solving is also a reliable source of dots … every step of research, every question asked, every WHY floated, delivers more information, providing a strong basis for ideation afterwards.
If we skip clarifying the situation, we only use what is already in our heads and risk providing solutions that do not relate to the situation on the ground.
Sound familiar? While I hope not, it probably does.
We value creative ideas over clarification and research. While the ideas are hard to value, they represent movement and action away from a problem. Asking loads of questions can and does feel like negativity, passivity. But it the most critical stage of any problem-solving process: information gathering.
Ideation is problem solving. What are your ideas for? To fill the gaps we perceive in the world.
So next time someone asks you to step into a brainstorm to help the team come up with ideas, ask a lot of questions before agreeing … otherwise you will probably end up wasting a lot of time, effort and budget.
Editor’s Footnote:
David Chislett is a Featured Columnist. You can read all his articles by clicking below
