Try a little time travel. Creative thinking is all about the future, so go there. Put your questions in the future tense and ask people to transport themselves there with you.
Invoke imagined reality. Role-play. You’re living in that new world, workplace, or community. What’s it like? Look up, down, 360 degrees around. What do you see? What do you think? What’s next?
Embrace disruption. Questions that drive creativity involve disruptive thinking that can be unsettling, uncomfortable, and sometimes downright subversive. That’s how we change the world.
Beyond the Possible
Creativity questions reach for the stars. Which is how we got to the moon.
When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to go into space on April 12, 1961, a wave of patriotic pride washed across the Soviet Union—and panic engulfed America. The Soviets were winning the Cold War in space.
President John F. Kennedy consulted the experts and set his sights on the moon. In May, he asked Congress to fund the initiative, noting that the scale of the project was so huge that “it will not be one man going to the moon … it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.” Then he set about selling the idea, asking Americans to be bold, think big to do something that had never been done. Kennedy came into office “asking” the nation to think, not about what the country could do for them but what they could do for their country. Now he wanted them to think outside their planetary constraints. When he spoke at Rice University in September 1962, observing that America had always thought big, he posed a set of questions.
But why, some say, the moon?
Why choose this as our goal?
Why climb the highest mountain?
Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic?
We do these things, the young president famously said, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
The brilliance of Kennedy’s questions—which were a hallmark not just of the moon shot but so much of his Camelot presidency—was in their ability to appeal to the country’s imagination, greatness, and sense of destiny. They asked Americans to rise to a challenge, to look to the future and to answer a higher calling.
The response was hardly unanimous. The Apollo mission was brave and brilliant, but according to Gallup polls conducted before the landing, it never enjoyed majority public support until the day the lunar module actually touched down on the surface of the moon. But when the time came, one out of every seven people on the planet watched the moon landing on TV. I was a kid at summer camp and listened on a battery-operated transistor radio as Neil Armstrong set foot on lunar soil and took his one step for humanity and read from a plaque on the leg of the Eagle Lander, “Here men from planet Earth first set foot on the moon … we came in peace for all mankind.” On that magical day, July 20, 1969, we rose to an extraordinary challenge and answered Kennedy’s questions in a way that captivated the planet.
Travel in Time
When we ask people to time travel—to fast-forward themselves to another place, another time—we issue a ticket to creative thinking. There are few moments in human history that rival the mission to the moon, but we envision the future every day. It’s how we set our sights and articulate ambitious goals.
When I started my term as a trustee for my alma mater, Middlebury College, the president was in the early stages of crafting a ten-year strategic plan. At our fall retreat, a facilitator started with a question that invited us to think creatively about the college’s future by going there.
“It is ten years from now,” he said, “and the latest college rankings have just come out. This school is at the top of the list. What are we doing?”
He put the future in the present tense. His question was a time machine. Once we stepped inside, the obstacles that often interfere with big ideas—practical considerations like cost, resources, staffing, and economics—fell away. We traveled past them and arrived at our destination, where we were the best. In our very own virtual reality, we looked around and listed the qualities that earned us the top spot. There was a new science center, a new library, more students who brought more diversity, more faculty, and more funding. The future was clear!
Everyone played. Then we worked backward to determine how to make it happen, from program design to funding. Today, the college has a beautiful science center and library. There are more students and more faculty. The school is in the top ranks of liberal arts colleges. We did it. Imagined reality became actual reality.
Since that retreat, I have used this technique many times, asking people to time travel to visit the future and see it for themselves. Imagine. It’s five years in the future. Your business has moved from number twelve in the marketplace to number three.
What are you doing?
Who are your customers?
What are you known for?
What are you proudest of?
Ask about the future in the present tense. Once you have articulated it, work to achieve it. There are no guarantees, but you can now ask what it will take to hit your benchmarks, who needs to do what, against what odds, and at what cost. You build a brick at a time. But it’s a lot easier when you’ve seen the place and know where you want to go and why.
Cutting Strings
How can questions convey authorship and drive genuine collaboration? How can they encourage people to take ownership of an idea or a concept and think differently, be original, and strive for the truly creative, maybe even the off-the-wall?
I wanted to explore those questions from a different perspective, far from the high-stakes stuff of space travel, politics, and technology. So I decided to go to where imagination exists for its own sake: Hollywood. Now, when you think of Hollywood, deep thought may not be the first thing that comes to mind. However, it is a place where creativity is an industry, where collaboration is a high-voltage necessity and success is measured in numbers—ratings and revenue.
I called my friend Tom Hoberman—a super-agent lawyer in LA who knew just about everyone—and asked him to connect me with the most creative, most inquisitive person he could think of. In a nanosecond, he recommended Ed Bernero, an insanely creative guy whose unlikely trajectory drove a supersonic career.
Ed is a big man with a big personality. His voice booms and stories spill out of him. He is a show runner, director, writer, and producer. He’s been involved with hit shows like Third Watch, Criminal Minds, and Crossing Lines. He mines the talent of everyone around him by shoving them out of their comfort zones and into their stories and their characters. He does it with questions that place writers, actors, and others into the imagined reality of story.
Ed isn’t a central-casting kind of Hollywood player. He grew up rough in Chicago, seeing his father beat his mother. As a young kid he called the cops more than once. He saw the police as his protectors. After a stint in the military and jobs working for security firms, he became a Chicago cop himself. He lasted nearly ten years—until he quit to save his soul.
Being the good storyteller he is, Bernero describes the scene when he realized he was in trouble, the protagonist confronting his discovered vulnerability. Ed and his partner were two good cops on patrol in a rough neighborhood. They stopped at the liquor store where they checked in every day and where a big guy I’ll call Lee kept them up to speed on what was happening on the streets. Lee sold them cigarettes for a quarter a pack. Cheap cigarettes, street-smart cops, and everyone was happy.