... more extreme questions yield insight more quickly. I don’t think of this exercise as a brainstorming session. I think of it more like scorched earth but without all the physical carnage
Who am I? What am I about? Where am I going? What do I really want?
Questions like these explore the underbelly of our consciousness as we second guess our origins, personal decisions, and where we fit in the grand scheme. It is generally considered a healthy exercise to question one’s core understanding, to challenge one’s assumptions, and to reassess one’s value system.
We’re a little schizophrenic about how much questioning we can take. As a society and media consumer, we gravitate toward creativity and exploration while shunning rigidity and closed-mindedness, but we also tend to worship stability, consistency, security, and some degree of predictability.
The good news for us is that as imaginative beings, we have a wonderful capacity for conceptual experiments. We don’t actually have to send live animals into space in a box with a nuclear device in order to get the gist of Schrodinger’s cat. We can – without putting hand to stone – work through the ins and outs of most any scenario we can dream up. For example, I can imagine my life without my current wife, or what it might be like to have been born into serious money, or what my neighbors might say if I painted my house fluorescent pink. The ability to radically question and to think up extreme scenarios can be quite thought provoking, potentially leading one to make real life changes, but also often to affirm the value of a choice or life standard already in place.
The same could be said for business strategy. As with the individual, it is healthy for the organization to run through a similar set of questions as I presented in the top of the article, replacing “I” with “we”. The answers to these questions provide a framework for how we approach almost any challenge or situation that comes our way. Any good, thriving company already has a clear sense of identity and where it fits but the best companies are also adaptable and as the environment changes, reassess. Kentucky Fried Chicken is now KFC and KFC is a very different company in some ways than was Kentucky Fried Chicken. These sorts of strategic moves don’t have to come as a result of paying millions of dollars to a consulting agency, which is essentially going to perform this same exercise, afforded the luxury to harshly question operations in ways that organization members might fear will taint them in the eyes of peers and leaders.
Whether or not you choose to share your crazy thoughts with others, it is worth your time to examine these fundamental questions about identity and to also perform some mental acrobatics with regard to your organizational strategies. While the exercise may not lead to wholesale change, it will lead to considerations that may put you on a path toward the next important strategic or innovative move. It could be something really crazy like, what if I swapped my Finance team with my HR team? How would their approach to these alternative roles differ? It could be something more practical like, what would I do if tomorrow my budget was cut in half? Or, how would I meet this objective if I didn’t have this particular technology at my disposal?
While both the extreme and less-extreme questions provide value, I’d argue that the more extreme questions yield insight more quickly. I don’t think of this exercise as a brainstorming session. I think of it more like scorched earth but without all the physical carnage.
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