How To Frame the Right Questions in Writing and Business Strategy

When I taught first-year college composition I always told students that the writing they did for me would be useful and applicable anywhere. And I believed it. Clear, simple writing targeted to a specific audience and purpose is teachable and essential to communicating within and across different fields. One can argue about *how* to go about teaching that skill (and the field of composition studies does!) but the skill itself is indispensable. So I agreed with the curriculum that made expository writing a required course for all incoming freshmen at my university.

But I never saw my students again — so it was hard to know how exactly the work I did in the classroom with them translated into their future lives or careers. My colleagues and I always emphasized the importance of writing as a tool for some specific purpose— besides the grade students have been rewarded for in the past. Writing should help you solve a problem, figure out your own opinion, or convey your research and opinions to others. We knew this had “real world” applications, of course, but we weren’t actually in that real world. So when I left academia this spring I was surprised to discover how much of what I teach overlaps with Lean Startup and Agile approaches to business. Here are a few of those points:

• Start with a good question. It needs to be testable and defined in scope and it shouldn’t be riddled with prior assumptions. Don’t write your essay asking “is public art a waste of time?” (which tips your hand) but “what are the criteria for evaluating public artworks?” Notice the shift from a yes/no question to something more open-ended. That’s important for writing projects and business problems too. It’s the lesson of the classic innovation starting point “How Might We…?,” which even has its own HMW acronym. In product development, don’t ask “should we develop a new product?” Instead explore “where are there opportunities for new products within our existing portfolio? For our current customers?” Small shifts in wording matter because the way you phrase the question frames how you will answer it.
• Then let that question go. Good questions generate other good questions and you should let them. Your initial question was open-ended on purpose: it was just a starting point and might lead you somewhere very different if you attend closely to your research. You are not “proving” something you already knew (which is how high schools often prepare students for SAT tests) but exploring what you don’t yet know. The key quality here is curiosity, which former Google CEO Eric Schmidt names as one of the two most important traits Google looks for in job applicants. [The other, by the way, is persistence.]
• Remember that dead ends and false turns are still productive. If you figure out what you disagree with or what won’t work that is progress too. To go back and redefine your question is not failure. You haven’t wasted your time. You’ve learned something that will make your next question more productive. In Silicon Valley, that attitude is called “fail fast, learn fast.” [Note that this is much, much, much easier to say than to do as it requires the constant, active re-framing of things that go wrong.]

This was the mindset I tried to develop in the students I taught — and I hoped it would carry over to other parts of their lives and future careers.

But it wasn’t until I started working with business consultants and coaches trained in Lean Startup and Agile methods that I realized how useful this approach could be in the business world. Both methods began in the software development world, where rapid changes in technology necessitate a flexible and responsive approach to business. As the methods have spread to other industries uncertainty and continuous learning have suddenly become key words among business leaders. It’s common wisdom that everyone is now in the software business and the same rapid technological change that disrupts industries and business strategy can also be used to sense changes in the marketplace and quickly respond to them. For this approach to work, business leaders must ask the same open-ended questions I expected of my first-year college students and be ready to shift gears as they learn. As you can see, comparing tech CEOs to college freshmen demands another key quality of Lean Startup and Agile methods: humility. As Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, co-authors of the book Sense & Respond, point out, adopting this new mindset for the new business environment will mean confronting and accepting that you don’t have all the answers already — and, in fact, you shouldn’t. This may feel uncomfortable, but adopting a student posture means you’re always learning.

This connection between writing process and business strategy is my bridge to a series of books I’m helping to edit and produce for the Sense and Respond Press, which Josh, Jeff, and I co-founded to produce short, actionable books at the intersection of digital transformation, innovation, and product management. Forthcoming books will focus on the responsibilities of leading innovation and the case for companies to change before they have to. But framing the right questions and approaching them with curiosity and humility are skills you can use any time and anywhere.

Sign up for alerts about our new releases and submit your book ideas here! To come: thoughts on my experience of #LeanStartupweek in SF….