Where do Great Answers Come From? Great Question(s.)

I'm catching up on my back issues of Hospital and Health Networks magazine, published by the American Hospital Association about design innovation called "How to Quit Fixing the Wrong Problem." There was reference to Albert Einstein in it, that I had to look up.

Jess Roberts (from Allina Health): "The biggest flaw with brainstorming is that it is almost universally an approach to come up with 'ideas' and ideas are cheap. We see this all the time. The same people get together to address the same problems, using the same approach and somehow expect a different outcome. Einstein had a term for just such an activity. Coming up with great ideas to the wrong problems are simply bad ideas in disguise."

It alludes to something very interesting, but I wasn't sure it it was the definition of insanity or another nugget of wisdom from Einstein. So I went searching, and found this:

Einstein was reported to have said, “If I were given an hour in which to do a problem upon which my life depended, I would spend 40 minutes studying it, 15 minutes reviewing it and 5 minutes solving it.”

The article from Soapbox had the headline: Good Ideas Come From Great Questions. I love this, because when I started as a writer, I was startled to find how few people knew what they wanted to say. That's why they were stuck! They wanted me to write something for them, but my first question was always "Why write something?" or "What do we want people to do after they read this?"

I work in health care research and often the right question is: Why does this matter? How is it different from what people have done in the past? Is it a different population? A different process?

It's not that your idea isn't good -- it's that you aren't asking the right questions. We could save a lot of time defining what we need to find out, particularly in an age of information overload. Be like Einstein!