Edwin Land (1909 – 1991) was an American inventor who had studied 
Chemistry. On holiday he took a photograph of his three year old daughter. She asked why she could not see the result straight away and she kept asking why. Land pondered this question and an idea formed in his mind. He went on to develop the Polaroid camera, a revolutionary product which sold over 150 million units and made Land into a celebrity. His daughter’s naive question had led him to challenge the assumptions that the whole photography industry took for granted.
One of the problem analysis exercises that I run on my Creative Leadership workshops is called Why, Why? You state the problem or challenge and then ask the group why. You write down their answers and for each one you ask why. You keep asking why – just like a little child. This carries on and in the process you gradually reach deeper and deeper into the underlying issues. The object of the exercise is not to solve the problem but to unpack it and to reach a fuller understanding of the causes. You then prioritise the causes and brainstorm to find solutions for the most pressing.
At work we tend to ask one or two questions and then plunge into ideas and discussion. But by asking more questions, and more basic even childish questions, we can discover insights that challenge our assumptions and allow us to reach deeper issues and better solutions – just as Edwin Land did.
Based on a chapter in Think like an Innovator by Paul Sloane published by Pearson.
Very inspiring and the basis of the innovation process after all. It seems that this simple question “why ?” is sometimes banned from many large companies.
Very inspiring
I teach a course on Creativity and Leadership originally from Stanford Business School in the ‘80s. We similarly explore powerful questions, sometimes called dumb questions. When a child asks this, ieri often see it as wonder and curiosity, but when an adult asks the same question, we often judge them for ignorance or not crafting intelligent questions. We all have the capacity for wonder when we silence our judgment and truly tap into our deepest wonder and longing.