Strategic questioning is a powerful tool for leadership, management, and coaching. It is also very useful for increasing innovation and creativity in the workplace.

Crafting the right strategic questions can involve some work particularly for solving leadership, management, or coaching problems. It turns out with innovation and creativity however that three of the most powerful questions are the simplest and we can learn them from the masters of creativity and innovation.

What are the three questions that children routinely ask that you can use to improve workplace innovation and creativity? Parents (or anyone that has worked with children) know these questions well. They are:

1. Why?
2. Why Not?
3. What If?

To improve workplace innovation  and creativity, managers and leaders must ask these three questions. These questions are so powerful because they challenge assumptions.

Challenging assumptions is a powerful tool for improving innovation that needs to become a part of everyday strategic thinking. Challenging assumptions is the ability to think different and this is the core of innovation and creativity. We have a real world example of the power of challenging assumptions with Apple Corporation.

Think Different was  the simple and powerful marketing campaign that Apple launched in 1997. (Looking at Apple’s success now, it is easy to forget that at one time this company appeared to be on life support.)  Apple’s Think Different Campaign was a major success that helped to relaunch the company.  Apple’s ability to think different, or challenge assumptions, (along with Steve Job’s leadership and the company’s solid marketing and engineering efforts) has clearly made it successful. Challenging assumptions is critical to workplace innovation and creativity.

Read this article to learn more about how challenging assumptions can improve workplace innovation and creativity.