Creative Question

Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

As leaders we are often tasked to solve problems and innovate creative and original solutions. A powerful creative question can help us get there.

A good creative question:
Leverages the findings from all the research we’ve done on the subject.
Helps us articulate a more relevant way to look at the problem.
Provides a direction to a “solution space” that will help generate many “out of the box” ideas.

Take Grant for example. Grant is a designer who was tasked with creating a better Cat scan for his company. His work led him to a children’s hospital where he and his team interviewed and observed children, parents, doctors and nurses. By doing this they developed a much greater awareness of the problem and came up with these key insights.
- Children feel bored, anxious, lonely, scared
- Procedure extends as a result, adding delays, costs and distress
- Children associate memories with a location
- Children will respond positively if they have influence over their procedure

With this information, they changed the original brief from “How do we make a better CAT scan?” to “How might we give scared children an experience they will love, while undergoing the CAT scan?”

A good creative question
- Starts with “how might we”. Research has found that using “might” instead of “do” creates more possibility and gives more permission to answer it creatively.
- Is User-centric
- Has an unreasonable stance and level of tension

Once we’ve found the right question, we can begin diverging in all types of ways to answer it. In Grant’s case his team created a magical hospital experience using colorful lighting, storytelling and role playing that children truly loved and made the CAT scan more effective for everyone involved.

What is the next big challenge you need to solve? What insights have you collected after researching it? And what would it look like if you turned it into a creative question?


Narrated by Franklin de Bekker
Animation by Sarah Nguyen
Written and Directed by Rod Ben Zeev
Executive Produced and Additional Written Content by Mark Vernooij