Skip to content

Killer Questions

Members Public

How To Use First Principles Thinking To Innovate

Thinking is one of the essential skills a person must learn. It allows us to decide, solve problems, and come up with new ideas. And yet, many people never learn how to do it properly. The history of thinking goes back centuries. The ancient Greeks were some of the first people to think about thinki

team collaboration using first principle thinking
Members Public

(Preparing For) A Failure of Imagination

With organizational failures, the imagination is often at fault. We can’t imagine things going wrong, so we don’t plan for them. Organizations can’t imagine that their employees would do something unethical, so they don’t have policies in place to prevent it. Owners can’t imagine that a natural disa

dropping thru as a result of a failure of imagination
Members Public

The Power of Human Ingenuity

“What are you going to do about it?” My grandmother was chastising me for whining about how life wasn’t fair – or some other perceived injustice. What could I do about it! I was only a kid. It’s someone else’s job to fix it! Or at least I thought so.  Instead of letting me pass […]

How can you talk if you haven't got a brain? asked Dorothy. I don't know, replied Scarecrow, but some people without brains d
Members Public

Killer Questions and Stepping Outside

Once you have assigned your Killer Questions, briefed your group, and set the date for the innovation session, it’s time for everyone involved to do observational homework. This is exactly what it sounds like. You need your team to get out of the office, into the real world, and make as many observa

Killer Questions and Stepping Outside
Members Public

Innovation Mentoring vs. Innovation Coaching: Which Do You Need?

Mentoring is certainly not a new concept. In fact, the name comes from a character named “Mentor” in Homer’s Odyssey. He was a trusted advisor to Odysseus’ son. Even though its roots run back thousands of years, however, the recent growth of social learning has given rise to a boom in mentoring and

Innovation Mentoring vs. Innovation Coaching: Which Do You Need?
Members Public

Ideation Workshop Game Plan

So what do you need to know as the leader of an ideation workshop? A workshop has multiple elements—participants, Killer Questions, and so on—but at the end of the day, the quality of the ideas directly relates to your ability to create a highly functional, highly effective group. In the following s

Ideation Workshop
Members Public

Education and Change

About a year ago I got a call inviting me to participate in a meeting with the Department of Education because they were actively looking at ways to innovate how kids are educated. I agreed to participate in a meeting in San Francisco, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do so. My […]

Education
Members Public

Brainstorming Quality Ideas

I’ve given you my system for using the Killer Questions to generate the quality ideas that lead to great innovations. Now comes your challenge: getting this information out of the book and into your organization. In this chapter I’ll give you a few essential rules for running a successful innovation

quality ideas
Members Public

Know that your customers’ needs will change

A big part of my business is being aware of, and responding to, the life cycles of my industry and my customers. Some of these are easy to see; you only need a cursory understanding of the effect of OPEC on gas prices in the early ’70s to understand why cars became more fuel efficient […]

needs
Members Public

In-house or Outsource as Needed?

What is your organization’s philosophy about design and development? Do you keep everything in-house, or do you outsource as needed? There are two schools of thoughts on this. By keeping the design process in-house, a company can build a sense of continuity and cohesion that links the entire family

outsource as needed