The Customers Who Walked Away

Think about the last thing you almost bought and did not.

You picked it up, you looked at it, you put it back down. You had a reason for choosing one item over its competitors, and you know exactly what it was.

Did anybody ever ask you why you didn't choose the loser?

Of course not. And somebody did the same thing to you this week. Something you made, or wrote, or suggested. An idea you put into a meeting that got a polite nod and then went nowhere. They considered it, decided against it, and you never found out the real reason.

Almost everything that comes back to you comes from the people who said yes. Inside a business, the machinery makes that official. Satisfaction surveys go to people who have bought. Reviews come from people who have bought. The customer list is a list of people who have bought. The one who put it back down is invisible to all of it, and that person is holding the answer.

So, where do you point a question to reach somebody who is not there?

Last week, we took a question apart and rebuilt it. But a well-made question aimed at the wrong thing comes back empty. Where you point a question is the other half of the skill.

Forty-two cards of Killer Questions A killer question is one that has been tested and proven to spark ideas beyond the obvious. The name comes from the old phrase "killer app," where "killer" meant standout, not lethal. I built this collection of questions the slow way.

I designed structured tests into my innovation workshops, which I was running: specific questions put to specific groups, and a record of what each produced. The rule for keeping a question was that it had to trigger something in that room. Did somebody walk out seeing their customer, their product, or the way they work differently than when they walked in? If nothing moved, the question was cut. If there was a good idea underneath one and I had simply worded it badly, I rewrote it and ran it again in another workshop.

There were hundreds of questions, and most did not survive. Forty-two did.

When I sorted the survivors, they fell into three groups. Not by subject. By where they aim your thinking.

Three places to aim Every question in the deck points to one of three things. Who, what, and how.