inGenius

"The question you ask is the frame into which the answers will fall."

— Tina Seelig

Seelig holds a PhD in neuroscience from Stanford's School of Medicine and is a professor in the university's Management Science and Engineering department, where she directs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the engineering school's entrepreneurship center. She also teaches creativity and innovation at the d.school. inGenius is the course she teaches her students on how ideas are produced, turned into a book.

The belief it changes is that of the lone genius struck by inspiration. For Seelig, creativity is a system she calls the innovation engine. It has three internal parts: knowledge, which is the fuel; imagination, which transforms that knowledge into new ideas; and attitude, which is the spark that starts the engine. And it has three external ones: the resources in your environment; the habitat, which includes the space, the rules and the constraints where you work; and the culture, the shared beliefs and behaviors of your community. The six feed each other, and when the ideas aren't coming, you know which part to tighten.

Three ideas to remember:

• The answer depends on the question. Reframing the problem is the most powerful tool and the most ignored. Seelig proposes brainstorming the question itself before looking for answers. Her example is simple: "how do we organize David's birthday party?" produces parties, while "how do we make David's day memorable?" opens up many more options. The company case is Netflix, which stopped seeing itself as a DVD-shipping business and defined itself as a movie-delivery business.
• Bad ideas are useful. One of her favorite exercises is to ask a group for the worst possible ideas and then look for how to turn them into good ones. One team took the idea of selling bikinis in Antarctica and turned it into a fitness trip with a catchy slogan. Removing the fear of the bad idea frees people to propose.
• Assumptions can be flipped. Make a list of what your industry takes for granted and ask what happens if you do the opposite. Cirque du Soleil turned the circus, a children's show, into a high-end performance for adults, and Southwest questioned whether airlines had to assign seats.

The habitat matters more than we usually admit. The physical space, the rules of meetings and the incentives tell people whether they are expected to invent or to obey. Well-placed constraints help: a blank sheet paralyzes and a sheet with three rules forces invention. In her classroom, Seelig uses challenges with limited time and resources, like the marshmallow one, where each team has eighteen minutes to build the tallest tower with spaghetti, tape, string and a marshmallow on top.

A simple place to begin: take the problem your team has gone weeks without solving and write it in one sentence. Generate five different versions of that question, changing the verb, the subject or the scale, and keep the one that's most uncomfortable. With that question, ask for ten minutes of the worst possible ideas and then look together for how to rescue the two most interesting. For the company, change one rule of the habitat: a visible wall of ideas, or a monthly meeting whose only agenda is to reframe questions.

As a founder it will help you unlock problems that seem to have no way out, starting with the one that matters most, the definition of the problem your company solves. Reframing the question also helps in a stuck negotiation or a personnel problem that won't give.