“Empathy means challenging your pre-conceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what you think is true in order to learn what is actually true.”
– Tom and David Kelley
Questions often assume a certain answer…. especially when it comes to questions related to problem-solving. Tom and David Kelly suggest in Creative Confidence, that innovation relies on reframing the questions that we ask regarding the problems that we are trying to solve.
If a question points to only one solution, perhaps try reframing it.
Kelley and Kelley offer these technique for reframing:
- set aside the obvious solutions
- step inside a different point of view
- find the “real” issue (we think people make decisions logically, but more often than not the root of a decision is emotionally-related.)
- Work from the opposite.