When Ideas Go Nowhere

In a recent community gathering, more than a few people there agreed that their collective narrative had featured years of ideas that went nowhere. Even major funding did nothing to take talk to results.

It wasn’t that the ideas were unworthy. It was that the community never learned how to translate ideas into action. It took less than an hour for them to learn this — leaving them unusually excited about the doing side of dreaming.

With just a few minutes of instructions, they turned ideas into questions. This was the magic. Questions have the power to inspire and shape action. They quickly create interest, traction, and momentum.

As usual, they generated right and wrong questions. Right questions are new and actionable; wrong questions are old and non-actionable. They discovered that more questions lead to better questions.

Ideas are optimal contexts for the formation of right questions. As I suggested to the group, the reason why anything good happened in the community was because people were working together from the right questions at the right time.