A good thinking tool shouldn't just hand users answers to their questions, but also guide and enable them to discover and articulate more complex questions.
Asking more complex questions, and discovering answers to them, which lead to even more nuanced questions. Without one, the potential of the other in this pair becomes limited.
A related thought: While building tools to solve hard problems for humans, we should strive to also improve people's depth of engagement with those complex problems and their solutions, as a way to preserve human agency when working with increasingly capable aids for our work. Otherwise, we risk losing touch with, and therefore understanding over, critical decisions.
Scale xor Explore, a hypothesis.
In innovation ecosystems, for efficient resource allocation all resource in an organization must go towards only one of two spends:
- Scale: Taking some working formula for solving a problem or producing something valuable, where there is "sign of life" and a way to scale production, and single-mindedly scaling it;
- Explore: Open-ended exploration to discover new signs of life of new regimes or transformative technologies.
These feel like two distinct modes of operating a single group of people. An organization is either doing (1) or (2), and any attempt to straddle them by doing something in-between will not do what you wish it would.
So, how to blend the benefits of both?
In larger organizations, while each team must be in one mode or another, the organization as a whole can have a portfolio of bets that combine both approaches at a sub-team level to trade off risk tolerance against upside. Some teams can be working on efforts of category (1), while others can be in category (2) mode.