Unlock the secrets of Warren Berger's three-part method to boost your creativity. Explore how this innovative approach can transform your thinking, ignite your imagination, and propel you towards unprecedented creative heights.
How creative inquiry works
If we want to do things that haven’t been done or learn things that have never been learned – in short, be more creative – we must learn to ask the right questions, ones so good that they’re half-answered in asking.
- Warren Berger proposes a simple method in his book A More Beautiful Question: The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning
- Each stage of the problem solving process has distinct challenges and issues-requiring a different mind-set, along with different types of questions.
How?
Once we think we’ve hit on a brilliant new idea, it’s time to see if the thing actually works
- Try the idea quickly and start getting feedback
- If you can instead enter the testing of the How? stage quickly, even by showing that an idea won’t work, then you can start the loop over again, either asking a new Why? or proposing a new What If? to an existing Why? thus moving your creative engine forward
Why?
Starts with the Why
- Seeks true understanding
- Challenges us to step back and stop thinking on autopilot
- Open up the idea that the current way might be wrong or inefficient
- Requires a step back from knowing – that recognizable feeling of knowing something but not knowing how you know it
What If?
The What If stage is the blue-sky moment of questioning, when anything is possible
- It engages the part of our brain that starts turning over old ideas in new ways by combining them with other unrelated ideas, much of them previously sitting idle in our subconscious
- This is where new ideas really arise
