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Make Room for Innovation: “Killer Queries”, with Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO, FutureThink, and author of Kill The Company
Being able to be very provocative and ask smart questions in the future is going to be very important. When we have so much data, so much information, we’re able to get a lot of answers through Google and search engines, et cetera, so the key thing that you need to be able to do is ask better questions so you get better answers. People do not know how to do that anymore. So killer queries is a tool that we have that gives people – it starts with over a hundred killer questions that you can ask your team on different topics, building an innovative culture, management, questioning your product, questioning your operations, but they ask questions in different ways and let me give you an example.
Typically you would get into a brainstorm and you would say what’s good or bad about our product. We say if we were winning an outstanding service award what would we be given for our product or service and why. Or let’s say you wanted to find out how people perceive your culture. Most people would ask the boring question, which is what do you think about our culture. We would say a killer question would be you’ve just written a tell all book about the organization, what secrets does it reveal? Or you’re going to have a corporate culture exorcism, what three things would you get rid of? There’s a big difference between asking the boring question and the provocative question. One gets better answers so we teach people to be more provocative with their questioning.