The sun always goes down faster than you expect when you’re deep in the forest. You think you have plenty of time. And then all of a sudden, the trail is grey, then the trail is just a suggestion, and then you are standing in a place you can no longer see. You reach for your flashlight or headlamp. This is the moment. Your thumb is on the switch. You can end this whole situation in one second. Turn it on and ten feet of path reappears ahead of you. Past the beam and all around you is still a black wall — six inches beyond the light it seems even darker now. The forest that was around you a moment ago is receding. Something breaks low and fast off to your right. You can’t see it. And you won’t. But what if you wait? What if you stand there in the darkness? The first few minutes aren’t great, for me at least. My heart races and I imagine all the things that are lurking in the shadows. Stalking me. I feel like I’m doing something stupid. My instincts argue with my choice. Then a trunk emerges from the dark — the white birch always show up first. Then a few feet of the trail. Not brightly, but there, a pale rift in the darkness. Then the space between the trees gains depth. A smear of foxfire on a rotting log. A lightning bug or two (fireflies to anyone not from Jersey). Looking up, I can see a canopy that is not black but very dark blue, with holes in it. Some stars shine through. I wouldn’t have noticed the foxfire in daylight. Lightning bugs don’t come out until dark. The forest has a light of its own that illuminates far more than my flashlight. I just have to wait for my eyes to adjust. Great Question In the June episode of the Innovating Out Loud webcast, Larry Robertson and I talked about questions — the subject of his new book, Great Question: The Art of the Ask and Getting More of What You Really Want. Forty minutes into our effort to question questions, Larry asked me a doozy. What do you already know that you will realize soon? I have made a living out of asking questions. I train people how to do it. This question did something only a handful of questions have done throughout my life — it hit my mental pause button. My mind went blank. Except that’s not right, and I got this wrong the first three times I tried to write about it. My mind wasn’t blank. It was dark. There was a there there — you can hear my oooooo reaction in the clip — I just couldn’t see it. Still can’t. But as I sat with it, my mind became a room with the light off. Dark, but it had depth. And then it wasn’t a room anymore. It was the forest. On or Off? I have been sitting with this question for nearly three weeks. I still can’t see very far down the trail but things are starting to emerge. My mind’s eye is starting to adjust. What was at first a surprise — the sudden darkness and wanting to find an answer — has eased into a calm abiding. It’s actually become rather nice. I’m enjoying the not knowing. I feel pretty sure that nothing is going to eat me if I just stand still for a little while. And I believe I will see some things that would have otherwise scattered. And I think that is the point of the question. It would be easy enough to ask AI to help me find an answer faster. I could pull together a panel of my experts to generate ideas, hundreds of them in minutes. But that would be like turning on the flashlight in the forest. Sure, I’ll see the trail. The worn path. But everything else will disappear into the shadows, maybe never to be seen again. My refusal to use AI in this case is harder than it sounds, because I’m an AI champion. I use it constantly and find it astonishing. But there’s a distinction in how I use it that I couldn’t have articulated a month ago. * Expansion by exposure — transcripts, research, arguments, other people’s thinking, ten times more of the forest than my legs could ever carry me across. That’s exploration. * Expansion by generation — hundreds of options, on demand, right now. That’s a flashlight pointed at my own uncertainty, and what it returns is the average of everything ever said about my problem. It’s the worn path with the rest of the forest gone black behind it. The average is in the beam. The extraordinary is in the dark, running away from the light. You and Only You Thought experiments have produced some of the largest breakthroughs in human history. Galileo mentally dropping rocks off the Tower of Pisa dismantled Aristotle’s theory of gravity. Einstein chased a beam of light in his head. No data. No lab. Just a person sitting with a question, adjusting their mind to it. That is the dark adaptation of innovation — of creativity. It is the oldest and most powerful cognitive practice we have, and it works precisely because we don’t turn the light on. The answer was already there. What was missing was someone sitting with the question long enough to perceive it. More specifically, what is missing is you. Perception cannot be delegated. Not because the other people or machines are stupid but because we do not have your perception. Your senses. Your collection of experiences. Someone didn’t come up with the theory of special relativity. Einstein did. So the Monday morning practice is not one of patience or even courage. It’s trust. Trust in yourself. Trust that your eyes will adjust. That your mind can work its way through a darkened path. There is a time and a place for artificial illumination. There are trails you actually need to see, deadlines you need to meet, and questions that already have answers somebody else found that are worth knowing. For those, use the light. I do, every day. But the truly novel answers, your truly novel answers, can only be found in the deep forest of your mind. And they may only emerge if you stand still for a little while and let them. I could not ask for a better next guest to continue this conversation: join me on July 23rd at 10:30 AM PT / 1:30 PM ET with Angus Fletcher. He’s the author of Wonderworks and Primal Intelligence — books that have come up in IOL conversations frequently — a story scientist at Project Narrative, and professor at Ohio State University. Angus argues that the human mind starts with story. A process he calls Narrative Cognition. By the time we chat, I will have spent a month sitting with a question that has become a dark forest. I THINK he’ll tell me that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft * Diverge-Converge-Synthesize As we say in the book, the best innovators diverge more often, and for longer, than everyone else — resisting the urge to converge early for the sake of order, control, or security. Because just like the flashlight in the forest, early convergence returns the middle of what's known, and misses the extraordinary. * Intentional Discovery Discovery doesn’t fit between meetings. That’s the finding from the book, and it’s the one people most often nod at and then ignore — because a calendar full of open space looks, to almost everyone, like a calendar full of nothing. Three weeks of not answering a question looks like nothing too. It isn’t. * Think Week Twice a year, Bill Gates would disappear to a remote cabin with a stack of papers and no company. The value was never in the cabin — it was in the removal of input long enough for something to surface. You can now recreate the cabin and fill it with a machine that will hand you three hundred ideas before lunch. That is not a Think Week. That’s a very expensive flashlight. * Questionstorm The technique in the book is to generate questions instead of solutions — who, what, when, where, how often — and hold off on answering. We use it to help open up the problem space, and by extension, the solution space. This piece was written with AI assistance. I use it to research, to think out loud, and to argue with. The judgment, the errors, and the sitting are mine. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com
