Questioning Assumptions

The singlemost important device for solving problems is,
- the question.

When Edwin Land's daughter was a small child, she wasn't highly educated and she wasn't especially clever.  However, she once asked her father why they had to wait for photographs to be developed.  Edwin Land was a scientist and started thinking about the problem.  As a consequence, the Polaroid camera was developed.

It would have been very easy to take for granted the fact that you had to wait for photographs to be developed, as it had always be so.  But because she knew nothing about the process, she was not inhibited by her experience (so much for received wisdom).

The questions we ask need not be complex, technical or brilliant.  If the daughter had qualified the question by asking if it was possible to get the photos 2-3 days quicker, a better process may have been developed, but it is unlikely that a revolutionary one would have resulted. 

It is the simple questions that provoke the richest ideas because they do not constrain our thinking and they test our fundamental assumptions.

Questions enable us first to identify our assumptions, and then to ask why they are so.

Solving a difficult problem is not a matter of 'scientific breakthrough' but of questioning your assumptions and breaking away from habitual thinking. When faced with a particularly difficult problem, we need to be bold with our questions. 

Your goal is to find a gap, an inconsistency, an exception, a condition whereby your assumptions do not hold.   This provides you with a new perspective and a path a solution.

There is a hierarchy of questioning that will challenge your assumptions

1. Find out what assumptions you are making
2. Ask if they are true
3. Doubt that they are true
4. Deny that they are true