Business development by definition often involves transformation and transformation very frequently requires overcoming different types of obstacles. Common strategies for facing obstacles, including knocking them down or trying to avoid them, often turn out not to be cost-effective or, worse, counterproductive. Given this, one useful tool that we can use to confront obstacles is the way we frame questions about potential business paths forward. Merely changing the form of a question so that it leads us away from the “what is” to the “how” can be a powerful force in transforming the at times limiting doors of past experience into the open window of new possibilities.

Business Transformation and Obstacles

A great deal of business development is an economic form of the ancient art of alchemy – taking the world around us and transforming it in some way into something new. This transformation can involve creating new products and services, developing new sales channels or even creating entire new markets. As we set out on the path to change the world around us, however, we often soon run into a common sight on the way to business success: obstacles.

In business, obstacles can take many forms, including:

• the absence of needed human, technological or financial resources;
• logistical challenges involved in transporting goods, services or workers from one place to another;
• legal or regulatory restrictions that affect business operations; and
• thinking, behavioral or operational habits that limit the scope of what is deemed to be possible.

What are our options when we meet these obstacles and others like them? Addressing them with force is one option, but when we use force to knock down an obstacle we often break or damage something that has a valuable role to play in what we would like to accomplish: if we force a drawer to close it often does not open again. We can try to go around the obstacle, but many obstacles have the unfortunate habit of following us or simply taking a new form and reappearing once again.

At the end we often realize that we need to go through obstacles rather than around them, large and impenetrable as they may seem. There are many paths through an obstacle, and what works for one person at one point in time may not work for another at a different point in time. But one powerful tool that can be used to create openings through often the most solid objects is a device that can put the sum total of human ingenuity at your immediate service: the question.

The Power of Questions

The power of questions to overcome obstacles can be illustrated with a simple example. Suppose you are walking along and you happen upon a bus. You walk up to the bus driver and ask, “Can an elephant get on this bus?” You can try this experiment for yourself if you like, but I can guarantee that you would be very hard pressed to find any bus driver who will answer anything but “no.”

Yet what if instead of asking “if” an elephant could get on the bus we asked “how” to get an elephant on the bus. If pressed, the same bus driver might say that, if an elephant simply had to get on the bus, it could be done if the back of the bus were removed, the seats were taken out and the bus was lowered. This arrangement might prove quite unsatisfactory to the transportation authorities, bus passengers and even the elephant, but thanks to a mere change in the form of a question an apparent impossibility would have been converted into a reality.

The history of business development is the story of the constant collision between bus drivers and people with elephants looking for buses. A person standing on a shore looking out across an ocean for the first time, the first person who conceived of human flight to the moon and scientists who raced to find a cure for Covid-19 all had to find a way to get a large elephant on a tiny bus. Each of them found a way to add 2 and 2 together to get 5.

Questions and Business Development

As we use questions to rebuild the bus to fit our elephant, it is useful to keep in mind different types of questions and their impact on the probability of generating new business solutions.

Question Type #1. Personal Perspective Confirmation. The first type of question is a request to confirm what we believe to be true. An example of this type of question might be, “A real estate investment is a good idea, isn’t it?” This is often the weakest form of question from a business development perspective, for two reasons.

The first reason is that it is simply asking for a confirmation of what we believe to be true, which can be very limiting as an approach to generate innovation because what we believe to be true may in fact not be true or may not contain the information or ideas necessary to accomplish what we would like to achieve.

The second reason is that this type of leading question will often elicit a response in agreement even if the person is not entirely in agreement or has not given the issue enough thought to form a reasoned response. This type of response does not allow the person asking the question to truly test their assumption or gather information that would really be of use to them.

Question Type #2. External Reality Confirmation. The second type of question is one that elicits a response based on a review of current reality or a person’s perception of current reality. The “can an elephant get on the bus?” question is an example of this type of question. What can be done is deemed to be a function what is done. Depending on the person asked, these questions can be useful in testing one’s assumptions about how the world works but are often not useful in generating ideas about how to change how it works.

Question Type #3. New Possibility Identification. The third type of question is one that asks “how” rather than “what.” This type of question is often very powerful for business development because it changes the focus from what things are to how to get to what they could be. It invites the person answering the question to identify the resources that they may be aware of that are relevant to the question and try to use them to create a path forward. These answers are often not a clear pathway to a solution but very often can turn out to be a part of it. Moreover, by posing questions to people who may have very different experiences from the person asking the question, they may lead to ideas that the person asking the question would not otherwise have thought of. An important part of the evolution of knowledge is the collision between what we know and what we did not.

Conclusion

Viewing business as transformation requires a strategy for facing obstacles, going through them and ideally even converting them into something that helps us advance our business objectives. Using questions to challenge existing assumptions and identify new pathways is a powerful way to increase the probability of the alchemy that converts needed ideas, improbable as they may seen given what the world currently looks like, into practice.