Introduction: The Power of Questions
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode four of The Brainy Business. Understanding the psychology of why people buy. This episode is called questions or answers. I am so excited about this one. Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to The Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business podcast. Let me tell you, I am so excited to talk to you about this today. Why? Because I love questions. I love asking them, being asked them, evaluating them, looking for new ones. Innovative approaches are all about asking questions, tons of them. And as a what if personality type, questions are my jam. I mentioned being a what if personality type. For those of you who are interested in Myers Briggs personality type testing, I am an ENTP. That means I am an extroverted, intuitive, thinking and perceiving person. And I’ve seen stats ranging from between one and 3% of females in the population being this personality type. So we are a rare breed. And because of the type that we are, I believe most of us like it that way. So in MBTI, all the types have their title to help describe and remember them. The ENTP is most commonly referred to as the visionary or the inventor. As an ENTP, my strength is understanding the world around me almost immediately, constantly absorbing ideas and images and turning possibilities into ideas. ENTPs are great at solving problems in unique ways and asking what is if? We’re also very good at helping other people to understand these types of concepts in a way that makes sense to them and to where they’re able to take action as well. I also, however, grew up with a love of finding and knowing the right answer. I’ve always been the straight A student and I’m pretty sure that if Harry Potter had been popular when I was in elementary school and around at that time, I would have had the nickname of Hermione and probably worn it with pride. But when it comes to brain training, what is better, questions or answers and why? My absolute favorite book is A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. I love it and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone. Of course, there is a link to it in the show notes in case this is your first episode with me. Welcome. I’m very happy to have you here, and I don’t mention it every time there’s something worth referencing, but anything that makes you think, I would like to hear more about that or read that study or find that book. It’s probably referenced in the show notes, which you can find within the app player. You are listening to this episode on or by visiting thebrainybusiness.com/four, because this is episode four.
Defining a Beautiful Question
Melina Palmer: Okay, now that that is out of the way, A More Beautiful Question is one of the most influential books of my life. I found it a little bit before I found behavioral economics. But while I was in that same innovation program I referenced in episode one, the name for the book was borrowed from an E.E. Cummings quote, which reads, always the beautiful answer to he who asks a more beautiful question. Ah. Isn’t that nice? You may be asking yourself, what makes a question beautiful? According to Berger, a beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change. That definition makes clear that this book is not about grand philosophical or spiritual questions. Why are we here? How does one define good? Is there life after death? All of those great questions
00:05:00
Melina Palmer: that spark endless, impassioned debate. The focus here is on questions that can be acted upon. So questions that shift the way you think about something or perceive things that serve as a catalyst to bring about change and can be acted upon. I, don’t know about you, but that definitely sounds like questions that are important for strong and successful businesses. And in the book, Berger outlines many beautiful questions which generated breakthroughs and changed life as we know it. Airbnb, the cheetah, prosthetic leg, Kodak film, whiteout and microwaves, to name a few examples in the book, each of those innovations came out of a beautiful question. And according to Berger, the right approach to questioning is to go from why to what if and finally to how questions. Let me tell you a little bit about each to help you understand what questions can do for you and your business. A, why question is your big, overarching question. This is where you start from, the thing that gets you up in the morning, the core of what you do. Passion, comes from here. This is a question that burns inside you. You find yourself coming back to over and over again. You could sit with this question for years and feel it nagging at the back of your brain. These questions can be something like, why can’t we? Why don’t they? Why do we have to? Why wouldn’t we? And so on. And asking great, inspiring questions doesn’t need to come from sophisticated academics who have been trained in questioning. In the case of Kodak, the question that spawned the innovations of the company came from the founder’s three year old daughter when she asked, why do we have to wait for the picture? The key is not shrugging off those questions. In our society, which has been built on schools focused on finding the right answers, yes, no, and multiple choice tests, or where asking questions makes you look dumb, or as if you’re challenging authority, we quickly learn to stop asking bigger questions, which is, in my opinion, a tragedy. We have a tendency to ignore big, beautiful questions that don’t have obvious right answers. Over years and years of training, our brains have been coded to look for answers and go with a status quo. But what about those people who do ask and then stick with their questions? They change the world. And you can too, with a little brain training. If you’ve heard me speak before, you know our brains are built on habits and rules of thumb which the subconscious brain uses to make decisions. If you consider the 99% of decisions being made by your subconscious brain, it’s letting a lot through the filter without paying much attention to it. As I discussed in episode one, unlocking the secrets of the brain, the subconscious can process 11 million bits of information per second, compared with the conscious brain’s, 40 bits per second. The more habits you let your subconscious brain get used to, the less, reason it has to stop and give your conscious brain something to work on, allowing it to be more and more complacent.
Training Your Questioning Muscle
Melina Palmer: I’m going to ask you a few questions about your morning routine. If you can write them down, that’s great. But if you’re out and about, simply think through this. They’re very easy questions that you should be able to answer pretty easily. All right, here we go. Which hand do you hold your toothbrush in? If you put on makeup, which items do you put on first? Which item is last? Do you do your hair before your makeup? And which hand do you use for each? What beverage do you typically drink in the morning? Water? Coffee? Tea? Orange juice? Do you eat the same thing every morning? And if so, do you prep it the same way? Which shoe do you put on first? When you grab your wallet and keys, which hand do you use? Do you always park your car on the same side of the garage? Do you take the same route to work? These are all places where your subconscious brain has likely taken over the process. You don’t even think about these items anymore, and you have trained your brain and allowed it to be lazy. If you want to train your questioning muscle, it can start with these simple tasks. If you were to try
00:10:00
Melina Palmer: and put on your makeup with your non dominant hand tomorrow. Would it take longer? Probably. would you have to focus and pay attention to what you’re doing to engage your conscious brain? Absolutely. What about if you took a different route to work so you didn’t have the luxury of zoning out? What would you notice on the drive that you would have otherwise missed? If you want to be more alert and a better questioner, I challenge you to pick one thing a day that you do differently than normal. Change things up and force your brain to pay attention and ask itself why it’s doing things. Notice more, wonder why it’s different or difficult, and ask more questions as you go along. As you get better at one thing, move on to the next. This can help you to come up with more and better ideas throughout the rest of your day.
How Your Brain Stores Information: The George Lakoff Example
Melina Palmer: Before I give you some tips on coming up with better ideas, I want to tell you a little about how your brain stores and retrieves information. In the book The Political Mind, a cognitive Scientist’s guide to your brain and its politics, the author, George Lakoff, provides a great description of how the mind connects information. He gives the example of the term blue square. When I said those words to you, blue Square, you likely got an image in your mind essentially instantaneously. It might seem like blue square as a concept is housed in one spot in your mind, but actually the concept of blue and the concept of square are housed in different areas. Your subconscious did a quick scan of all the colors, not green, not red, not yellow, but blue, and shapes, not circle, not triangle, not rhombus, but square, and brought these two pieces back as one combined image in your brain. Pretty impressive if you consider the speed at which that image popped into your head. And what happens if you make it a little more complex? If I was to say red rose, or better yet, if you were to see an image of one, what happens? You get the same color issue as with blue square, but there is now a dimension of being a flower instead of a shape. When you hear rose, your brain has to dig into all the items that are not roses, not daisy, not sunflower, not dahlia. And you also get the emotion tied with a rose being red. Red roses are commonly associated with love. Yellow roses with friendship. White, pink, or orange roses have different meanings as well. If it’s February, you might be wondering about Valentine’s Day, perhaps having a quick fear of did I miss it? Or you might remember a past gift from a loved one and how that made you feel. Or possibly if your significant other forgot your last anniversary and that made you angry and the emotions are flooding back now. Perhaps you also have the scent of roses in your mind, of which your brain has to sift out all the other flowers and scents around you which are not associated with roses. If your mother or grandmother wore perfume scented with rose petals, and you’re reminded of holidays or weekend mornings where she went through her own morning routine and the scent wafted through the house, whoa, that’s a lot to go through. It’s no wonder we need those 11 million bits of processing power. If your conscious brain, and it’s 40 bits per second, had to evaluate all that, you would never get anything done. And that’s just one tiny item in your mind.
Beyond Brainstorming: Question Storming for Innovation
Melina Palmer: What about all the peripherals that are still taking place around you? You might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with questions, answers, and my business let’s say you need to come up with a new idea for your business, perhaps a product name or a new segment you want to branch into. If you were to call your team together to work on the problem, what would be the most likely item on your agenda? Was it brainstorm a list of ideas? For most people, especially in business, brainstorming is the one thing you have been taught to do for answering questions of any size. But this is not a very effective tool, especially if you are starting with the wrong question, which I will get to a little bit later in the episode. Brainstorming is picking items off the surface and not really digging in. It’s within your brain’s habitual decision making and rule of thumb mentality. It’s lazy idea generation that keeps you searching at answers instead of looking for questions. When I’m taking a client through a virtual strategy session or a deep dive, my main task is to help them think about and approach their problems from different angles to get beyond brainstorming and use other tactics.
00:15:00
Melina Palmer: If you’re looking for a resource that can help with some brain training activities, I recommend the book ThinkerToys. It has a lot of great alternatives to brainstorming that can help you get to, more innovative approaches. One easy thing to try is question storming instead of the basic brainstorm. When brainstorming, you typically start with a question and come up with a bunch of statements to try and answer that question. But if you flip it around and start with a statement, and then instead of attempting to come up with a possible solution, you lay the ground rules that one, every item generated needs to be in the form of a question, two, we will not answer any questions and three, the goal is to simply ask as many questions as possible. What will happen? You get to places you wouldn’t have expected. Your brain is allowed to wander and inquire and explore into the depths of what your subconscious is evaluating. Let me give you a business example. in a typical brainstorm, you might say something like, what products do people want? And then your brainstorm will have a long list of things that it quickly associates with. And after about 15 minutes, you’ve exhausted everything in your brain, or everything that people feel it’s okay to say out loud because the statement their brain is stuck on feels stupid and they’re self conscious about saying it in front of everyone else in the room. Then you pick one item off the list and hope it works. If instead, you started with a statement, it could be something like, people want products that make their lives easier. And then you come up with questions like, why do they want their lives to be easier? Who says what is easier? Easier than what would they prefer to have something better, even if it wasn’t easier? What if people liked things to be harder? How could we get someone to use something that was more difficult? What products do people like that are not easier? When does price become more important than ease? Do you see what’s happening here? You’re reaching areas you never would have thought of in the typical brainstorm. And perhaps you will get to a new question that is different than what everyone else knows. To ask your why do we have to wait for the picture question to bring it back to Berger, generating the first beautiful question is not enough. How many children asked their parents, why do we have to wait for the picture only to hear? Because that’s how it works. And eventually, no more questions. Ugh. The horror. It takes a special person to hear a question like that and say, yeah, why do we have to wait for the picture? And once you have this question, the next phase in the more beautiful question process is to ask what if questions. This is where you take on a problem as your own and start to shift your thinking. For Pandora, the question was, what if we could map the DNA of music? Powerful stuff. In the case of The Brainy Business, my why? Question is, why is behavioral economics the best kept secret? This eventually led to my what if questions. What if I showed people why it matters? What if I told people how it works? What if it wasn’t so academic? What if I made the connections? What if I made it easy? What if questions often bring together items that already exist and use them in a new way. A funny example is the true story of a man walking through a bookstore, he saw a bunch of Lincoln biographies on one bestseller table, and, the next bestseller table had a bunch of vampire novels. And he thought, what if those were combined into one superbook? And because he stuck with that question instead of brushing it off as a silly thought, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, was born. In case you’re not familiar, this book was adapted into a movie which made about $116 million at the box office. Almost every great innovation comes this way. In that Pandora example, music was not new and DNA mapping already existed, but they had not been put together. In my opinion, one of the greatest concepts in A More Beautiful Question is when Berger says, essentially, when thinking this way, which he calls combinatorial thinking, which is basically combining two different items together, you want to go beyond just linking A and B, but rather A and Z, or better yet, A and 26. And, this is where the steps I outlined earlier
00:20:00
Melina Palmer: in the episode from ThinkerToys, question. Storming and changing up your daily routine can help you to be a better questioner. Better at linking distant connections and paying attention to them, and thus better at defining and solving problems.
The Importance of Asking the Right Questions
Melina Palmer: Once you have your what if questions, it’s time for the final piece of Berger’s question, how? And the main lesson here is to fail quickly and often to continue asking how questions until you get to the one that sticks. For The Brainy Business, I asked things like, how can I teach this to as many people as possible? How can I make the concepts more applicable instead of academic? How can I make it relatable? How can I reach enough people through public speaking? How about writing a book? Until eventually I got to how about a podcast? And that, of course, had its own slew of questions. The real skill comes in asking more questions. But is there such a thing as right or wrong questions? And when do we get to answers? One of my favorite Einstein quotes is, if I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. When I work with clients, I often ask them to start with a problem, and I help them attack it with many different questions, similar to what Einstein was saying here. The problem can come in the form of a question or a statement or an abstract thought. It doesn’t really matter. And more often than not, where we start, the day or conversation is completely different than where we end up, and it’s somewhere that’s so much bigger and better than they imagined. When we started out the day, for example, someone might come to me and say, I don’t know if my information sheet is as effective as it could be, or is my lead magnet interesting enough, or do I have the right target market, or how many products should I offer? Truly, any starting point will work, and then I help them to find if this is the true problem to be solved, to use the Einstein quote as a reference so we can make sure they are actually answering the right question. And this is a step that most businesses miss. You just sort of ask a question and then go about solving it, or you find a problem and you go to fix it, but you’re not sure if it’s the right one. One thing I found recently is people are really scared of choosing the wrong question or working on the wrong problem. And instead of asking more questions and going through the process like I have here, what they end up doing is sort of the ostrich effect of, well, if I don’t ask anything, you know, it’s the if it’s not broke, it can’t get worse, or it can’t be that bad sort of situation. And my response is always the same. Don’t let your fear of finding the perfect question keep you from getting to the right answer. I hope what you’ve learned in this episode is that it takes many, many, many questions and avenues and considerations and tests to find the path to an answer. Start asking questions, as many as you can, as quickly as you can, and see which ones stick with you. I promise you that the right questions, the right ones for you will emerge. And in case it hasn’t become clear already, let me explicitly say I put far more stock in questions than answers. Our society has an answer obsession. But I challenge you to be a questioner. Ask why, ask what if? Ask how, and ask them as often as you can. In your work. Look for those sacred cows, the things no one does anything about, or because that’s the way we’ve always done it, statements and say, what if we didn’t? Or how might we do it differently? Or what if we couldn’t do it that way anymore? Or if a new company was going to start from scratch, how would they do it? I came across a quote recently from a statistician named John Tukey, which might become one of my new favorites. He said, far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. If you can easily find an answer, you’re likely asking the wrong question. Helping organizations to ask better questions and look at things in a new way is probably
00:25:00
Melina Palmer: my favorite thing to do. I have built my company around this work either through virtual strategy sessions, which is a call via video chat where I provide my client with the recording after the fact for added value and an ability to keep learning after the session is over, including sharing with others on the team. Or we also can do a deep dive where I work with a person or a team for a full day and really dig into any and everything. There are so many questions flying around on this day and we’re able to make some amazing breakthroughs. Seeing the shifts my clients have made after these sessions is beyond words for me. I watched one entrepreneur uncover her true passion and shift her business model to a more ideal life for her, and it has been so fun for me to watch her offerings grow and change over the years. Another business owner said after working together on a deep dive, she had her most profitable year ever in eleven years of owning her business. Wow. Stories like this are why I love what I do and I would love to help you find that success as well. Those two examples are from small business, but this model has worked with larger companies as well and for all aspects of business. To which I say, if you are interested in working together so you and your team can think differently, to ask better questions and exceed goals, I would love to work with you. Simply visit the website thebrainybusiness.com and click on work with me. You can also email me@melina@thebrainybusiness.com if you prefer to start a conversation that way.
Conclusion and What’s Next
Melina Palmer: All right, there you have it. Episode four of The Brainy Business podcast, questions or answers is coming to a, close. You now know a little more about how your brain associates items together and why being a master questioner can help you to win in business. I hope you tune in next week for episode five, which will come to you directly if you are subscribed to my email list or via your podcast app. That episode is about setting prices and negotiating contracts, something I get asked about all the time and I know you aren’t going to want to miss it. Thanks again for listening and learning with me. Remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
00:27:44
