reframe the question

“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:

  1. set aside the obvious solutions
  2. step inside a different point of view
  3. find the “real” issue (we think people make decisions logically, but more often than not the root of a decision is emotionally-related.)
  4. Work from the opposite.


%d bloggers like this: