← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
498. From Questions to Innovation: The Path to Better Answers
00:27:07
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer dives deep into the art of questioning and its vital role in driving innovation and success in both personal and professional realms. As the 498th episode approaches the milestone of 500,...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
Melina Palmer
Hey there, Melina. Here to celebrate 500 episodes of the Brainy Business, we've put together some goodies for you. First off, our website is now searchable so you can find books and episodes by topic, guest or behavioral concept. Just visit the BrainyBusiness.com podcast or TheBrainyBusiness.com books to try it out. And for the first time ever, we have pulled together all of our more than 125 free worksheets in one easy to use guide, including a brand new Brainy kickstart worksheet that can be used to take a first action and gain momentum in 10 minutes or less. Head to the BrainyBusiness.com guide to grab your free companion guide and get instant access to all the best tools. That's the BrainyBusiness.com guide. Let's make applying what you learn easier than ever. Thank you for more than one and a half million downloads across 500 episodes of the Brainy Business. I'm sure you'll love this episode too. So when you're ready, let's start the show. Welcome to episode 498 of the Brainy Business. Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about questions and answers. Ready? Let's get started. 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. Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Wow. Wow, wow. Did you catch that? This is the 498th episode of the show. 498. We are so close to 500. I can barely believe it. It's next week. I am so blessed and honored to have been on this journey with you. In the time of this recording, we are almost at one and a half million downloads of the show across more than 170 countries over the years. It's possible we might pass that milestone by the time the show comes out, but even if we don't, how cool is that? Amazing. Thank you for making it possible. I'm always thoughtful about guests and the experience on the show, but I always take a little extra time to reflect and plan for milestones like this one. And it so often comes back to curiosity and asking good, thoughtful questions in life and business. So when I heard there was a new book coming out called how to Fall in Love with Questions, I knew it was the perfect fit for for $4.99. And that opened up the perfect opportunity to refresh this episode, which originally aired as the fourth episode of the podcast way back in July of 2018. And yes, you heard that right. Episode 4 this episode is all about which is better questions or answers. Told you, this has been central to my approach forever. While you can probably guess that I'm going to say questions are better, better and more important, why they matter and how you use them in your work are the focus here. Whether you're a natural questioner or not, I am confident you will get value out of this episode and I hope you enjoy this blast from our brainy past. Don't forget, links for my top related past episodes and books are waiting for you in the show notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 498 all right, let's talk about questions, answers and which you should focus more attention on. 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 EE Cummings course 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 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 they 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 the 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. 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've 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 and put on your makeup with your non dominant hand tomorrow with 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. 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 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 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. 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. And 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 if you're looking for a resource that can help with some brain training activities, I recommend the book Thinker Toys. 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, 2 we will not answer any questions and 3 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. 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 have 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 strange, 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 if you 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. 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 in the episode from Thinker Toys 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. 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 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 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 Tookie 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. So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about questions and answers today? For me, I of course still love questions and talk about the importance of curiosity and asking better with my clients constantly. Sometimes this is done through a formal question storming session with me, which I love to do. So please, Please do email melinathebrainybusiness.com if you want to see if this would be a fit for your team. We also have a forum on the website you can fill out to get in contact with us. One of the big things I have Learned in almost 500 episodes of this show and through years of interviews and research is that taking more time to ask thoughtful questions is key to business and brand success. We have been trained to look for answers, to jump to the solution, to find that one right, perfect answer, to show our value to the group and avoid avoid potentially looking dumb and then move on. But that isn't the best approach most of the time. Fortunately, we humans are born questioners. We're inquisitive and curious and can be so easily engaged in learning more and being thoughtful. When you give your brain the space to reflect and wonder, there's so much opportunity to be innovative and create better brand experiences, or find creative solutions to employee problems, or to see the value of your product in a new way and come up with a new, engaging pitch that changes the game, or to find a new habit that will help you achieve your goals. The opportunities are endless and it all starts with questioning. Yes, there is a time for answers, but don't waste time trying to answer the wrong question or work on the wrong problem. Invest the time up front to be thoughtful and ask more questions. You'll be glad you did. In the spirit of questioning, I'd like to ask you one now. What is a powerful question that has changed your life or work. This may be something you ask yourself before deciding to jump into an opportunity or not. Or maybe it's a question you ask prospects that helps them to realize if your offering is a fit for them or not. Or a question you always ask in job interviews that help see you identify the best candidate or anything else. I'd love to hear about it. Let's share powerful questions together. Come share it with me on social media. You'll find me as the Brainy biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. I can't wait to hear from you as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes with links to my top related past episodes, books and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the Brainy Business. And just like that, episode 498 on questions and Answers is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Elizabeth Weingarten, author of how to Fall in Love with Questions. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be Fox. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.