“What if my challenges are simply unanswered questions?”
This is exactly what we’ll be exploring today: a way to see challenges a questions. I’ll share with you something I call the Question Capturing Method.
If you currently face an area of your business, you feel stuck with, like
- being unsure what the clear purpose / vision of the company is,
- what kind of product or service to create next, or
- how to prioritize your work,
this is the simplest way I’ve found to solve these challenges.
It works because it makes our unanswered questions transparent.
This is essential because our challenges come from two areas:
(a) I don’t know which question I’m stuck with
(b) I know which question I am stuck with and I’m avoiding it
This method helps with both. For (a) it can help, because we create a long list of questions and for (b) it can help because we make the question we are avoiding explicit by writing it down. There’s a different quality to problem solving once we get into the habit of writing questions down.
In short: We get to quickly pinpoint the most critical question and explore it.
Here's how you can do it in three easy steps
Step1: Create a challenge statement
What do you currently feel stuck with? Create a short statement in one sentence, describing the challenge.
Let’s use the following as an example:
“I work a lot, complete one task after another, but don’t see the result I am after.”
Step 2: Capture questions
Take a few minutes to capture as many questions as you can relating to your challenge statement.
For the challenge listed above, the questions could be:
- What is the result I am after? Do I have clarity on the result?
- Am I working on the right things?
- What tasks might I completely eliminate or reduce that pay very little into the result I am after?
- What are the few tasks that pay most into achieving the result?
- How might I increase my focus to complete the tasks quicker without getting distracted?
- What positive qualities do I associate with “working a lot”?
Step 3: Select and deep-dive
Select one question that you believe will be the most important one to solve your challenge. This might be the question that is most difficult to answer for you and that’s a good thing: if you had a quick answer to it, it might have already been solved. Take a few minutes to answer this question.
There are two things that might happen:
- You’ve answered the question in one sitting. That’s great. Sometimes there might be one or the other task that emerges from this exercise. Capture it in your task management system.
- You haven’t come up with a complete answer. That’s great too. You can (a) sleep on it and revisit it the next day (b) go for a short walk, away from any screens to give the question some space.