AtQ – What Would You Change?

Asking Powerful Questions

What would you change?

In the 1990s Gregory Hines was recruited to become part of a huge advertising campaign by Apple, Inc., dubbed Think Different. In the campaign Apple aligned themselves with some of the most recognizable innovators of recent history. What made the innovators who they were was the difference between them and everyone else around them at the time of their innovation. It’s not that nobody else was tap dancing when Gregory Hines was around. It was that nobody else danced quite like Gregory Hines.

This is a bedrock of how we perceive creativity, the topic of this week’s Talking Note. While we are making choices all the time, and involved in the creation of moments perpetually, we are only struck by choices that are out of the norm. We pause to think through important decisions. We feel more alive (or stressed, depending on your perspective) when making choices that don’t have guaranteed outcomes. To develop a sense for the power we have in our choices, we can play at various levels of risk with the idea of change. We can start with this question:

Given any aspect of life, we can begin to identify moments, situations, or experiences that we would like to change. This is just the start of a host of other questions, but how we start is important. We can further focus this question down by asking this nuanced version: