Good questions are now more important than good answers

초코송이단 2025년 06월 12일

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Whenever I start a new project, I sit down with my team to discuss "how do we do this?" and we always fall into a similar pattern: we benchmark what's worked before, or we list the safe options, and then we run out of time, and we end up coming to the conclusion that "we're just going to do it the way we've always done it." Last year, I was working on a project that really needed a breakthrough idea, and the old ways of doing things just weren't working.

Last year, I was working on a project that really needed a breakthrough idea, and I couldn't see any way out of the box. An innovation consultant gave me some advice that completely changed my mindset: "Don't try to solve the problem, redefine it first. Depending on what you hypothesize, you might come up with a completely different solution."

From then on, I realized that the key to creative thinking is not being good at finding answers, but being good at asking questions, especially if you can formulate your hypothesis from a different angle than others, you will naturally arrive at innovative solutions that are different from others.

Prompt.

복사

As an expert in creative hypothesizing methodologies, please answer.

**Current challenge**.

- The problem you're trying to solve: [specific problem situation].

- Limitations of existing approaches:[what you've tried so far and gotten stuck].

- Constraints:[time/budget/technical limitations].

- Transformation goals:[the level of change you want to achieve]

**Disruptive Hypothesis Generation Strategy

⟐ Step 1: Problem Redefinition Technique

- "What if[the core premise of the problem] is wrong?" backwards questioning technique

- Decompose the problem into three layers (surface/middle/root) and generate different hypotheses for each.

- How would [another field/time period/culture] approach this problem? Analogizing

⟐ Step 2: Explore extreme scenarios

- What solutions would be possible if there were no constraints at all?

- Conversely, how would we approach it in an extremely constrained situation?

- What if failure was impossible / failure was welcomed?

⟐ Step three: Construct convergent hypotheses.

- An approach that combines principles from [2-3 completely unrelated fields].

- Find a third way to achieve opposing goals simultaneously

- Hypothesis that turns a weakness of existing solutions into a strength

⟐ Step 4: Refine into verifiable hypotheses

- For each hypothesis, state key assumptions and how they can be verified

- Design experiments that can be tested quickly and inexpensively

- Build a learning system to revise and evolve your hypotheses

Include practical hypothesis generation tools and evaluation criteria.

After applying this systematic hypothesis-generation methodology to our project for six months, we were able to uncover some truly unexpected creative breakthroughs. The biggest change was a completely multidimensional expansion of our 'way of looking at the problem'.

For example, instead of the common assumption that "to increase customer satisfaction, we need to make our service better," we hypothesized, "What if we could change the very criteria by which customers feel satisfied?" The result was a whole new approach to managing customer expectations instead of improving service quality.

The convergent hypothesis building method was particularly effective: borrowing ideas from seemingly unrelated fields and combining them to create innovative solutions that hadn't been tried before. For example, we combined leveling up systems in games with step-by-step learning in education to create a completely new customer engagement model.

Another interesting discovery was the power of "exploring extreme scenarios." Hypothesizing about extreme situations, such as "What if we had an unlimited budget?" or "What if we had a zero budget?" led to a flood of creative ideas that we would never normally think of.

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