Page 91 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

82 ASK A BETTER QUESTION

That question put us in a place where we didn’t know the answer,
where we had no choice but to wonder. And then we found the answer.
Are you ready for this? In a long match, a single tennis player can run
as much as five miles. Now that’s a surprising premise. That puts com-
fort in a very important position. The creative execution we chose—to
paint the soles of a guy’s tennis shoes and have him run around the ten-
nis court leaving five miles of footprints—was a very interesting TV
spot. And it worked! Colgate ran the ad for nine years. Veterans of the
ad biz may remember AdAge’s top 100 TV spots. This commercial made
that coveted list in the 1970s.
Someone asked a better question. It led to a better answer. We all
do this on our best days. Do we do it consciously? Do we do it inten-
tionally? Do we do it consistently? Now that you are more aware that
this is a fundamental of creative thinking, maybe you can use this tech-
nique to lobotomize the part of your brain that comes up with the same
old answers. By pushing yourself beyond the known, you might just
get a better idea.

7

BETTER QUESTIONS ON TOP OF
BETTER QUESTIONS

Once I was leading a brainstorming group for a major computer man-
ufacturer, and we were exploring better phone support for their con-
sumer PC line. As you may understand, computers sold to people in
business are acquired by a central purchaser (IT, MIS, whatever) who
is computer-savvy and purchases thousands of units. In offering phone
support for such people, you can speak their language. But in offering
phone support for home users, you have to take a different approach.
We were well into the brainstorming session and coming up with hun-
dreds of ideas, some of them quite good, when someone asked, “How
about if we assume the person at the other end of the line is five years
old? Wouldn’t that cause us to make different assumptions and
approach this phone support differently?” Well, let me tell you, a lot of
people’s eyes lit up. Yes! Because the people calling for support on
home computers are not sophisticated, let’s assume they’re five years
old. (This was around 1995 when the PC market was in steep growth.)
But a few minutes later someone else said, “Wait a minute. Aren’t kids
coming out of the womb pointing and clicking? Maybe we don’t
assume the people on the other end of the line are five years old. Maybe