Creative activities to promote innovation (The art of questioning)

Today I will continue developing my series of articles I have been writing about innovation and a list of tools we can use in order to promote creativity among our employees. Remember the ones I have presented until today: Blue Slip, morphological analysis and brainstorming. Don’t hesitate to check those posts before you continue with the present one and understand the difference between innovation and creativity.

The technique I will presented today is called The art of questioning and was created by the same author that developed the well-known Brainstorming activity: Alex Osborne. He always stated that “questioning is the most creative human conduct”. Therefore, he developed a basic list of questions that can aid us in order to analyze a problem from different approaches and extend our perception about a same situation.

The firs thing you must do is establishing the problem or situation that you want to resolve. Taking this into account you must establish some determined questions about the situation. The questions will depend on each case, but in general you can determine them with the aid of Osborne’s list:

• When? What type? With what?
• Why? Which? In What?
• What? For what? About what?
• Using what? With whom? From what?
• What type of? From where? To where?
• For what? For what reason? For how long?
• To whom? From whom? More?
• For whom? How? More often?
• Who? To what extent? Less?
• All of them? How many?
• Not all of them? Al what distance? For what?
• Important? Where? From where?
• Again? Where else? More difficult?
• How many times?

Once you have planned the exercise and established the questions you can share them with the group in order to be answered. When they have been answered the problems vision must be extended and it might provide a better context in order to generate new ideas and solutions to the problem.

On my next post a new technique to create!

Image taken from  Flickr.com