A More Beautiful Question

This is an amazing book and it’s all about how to innovate. The author raises a very interesting point that we are always running after answers however, to come up with something truly innovative, we must ask the ‘More Beautiful Question’.
So what does it mean to ask the more beautiful question? It can be broken down into 3 main steps:

• Why?
  As we grow up, our minds become more rigid and accept a lot of things because that’s how it has always been. We stop asking this basic question – why? The application is slow, um, that’s because it’s a large system which needs to serve multiple requests concurrently. No, we need to step back and ask – why? Why is the application slow and come to the root cause.
• What if?
  Now that we have identified the probable root cause, next question is ‘what-if’? In this step we must forget about all constraints and what’s practical and impractical. We should just come up with all solutions that we can think of, and as stated before these does not have to be practical. This is important to understand, as an absurd idea in itself may not be of much value but it can lead to more and more ideas some which may actually be viable.
• How?
  Now, that we have brainstormed a lot of solutions to the given problem, now is the time to figure out what actually is practical of all the options mentioned. Which one of these can be really achieved given the current constraints and one or two may actually fit the bill.

What happened in this exercise is that we kept aside the practical aspects till the last stage and let our thoughts move freely beyond any restrictions. By taking a step back and not chasing after answers we have allowed ourselves to think beyond the obvious and come up some potentially unique solutions.