What's Your Question? The Missing Skill That's Killing Innovation

Your colleague just finished demoing an amazing AI tool. To you, the possibilities seem endless. But instead of leaning forward with curiosity, your team leans back with crossed arms, minds racing with objections. "But what about data security? What if it makes mistakes? How do we know this will actually work?"

Congratulations. You've just watched innovation die in real time.

The Evaluation Trap That's Strangling Your AI Transformation

I have to confess something embarrassing: I almost fell into this trap myself two weeks ago.

During a GPT showcase with the San Antonio Spurs (fun case study here), an HR exec we’ll call Laura demonstrated a custom onboarding tool she’d built. My immediate reaction? Pure evaluation mode: "What's the economic impact of this tool?" (Remember, I’m a recovering MBA, people!!) When she couldn't answer, my inner finance guy started judging. Classic critical thinking—exactly what I teach people NOT to do.

But then I caught myself. Instead of asking "What do I think of Laura’s tool?" I shifted to "What does Laura’s tool make me think of?"

Suddenly, an idea sparked: Wouldn't it be cool to have a GPT that helps people like Laura calculate the economic impact of their innovations and make a business case for leadership?

Right there in the session, I built it. Live. Here's the Economic Impact Calculator GPT I gave Laura beta access to as a gift of thanks for sparking a new idea.

There’s an enormous difference between our default evaluation mode and what we call being "sparkable"—where the value of an input isn't in its own merits, but in its effect on the thoughts that follow. For what new ideas this input sparks in you. Sparkable listening = valuing an idea not for its own merit, but for what it sparks in you.

You’d think that, as the innovation expert in the room, I’d be immune to such slips in (or rather, into) judgment, but the truth is, I’m vulnerable to the same cognitive biases that have plagued would-be-innovators from the dawn of time.

Here’s another example: months earlier, I'd heard about someone using Gemini to search their email and export results to a spreadsheet. Sounded cool. I nodded appreciatively. I did nothing.

Thankfully, my regular “Run an AI experiment” calendar block popped up, and gave me the space to experiment. I'd been sending a collaborator random ideas for a project and lost track of whether they'd been incorporated. Remembering the Gemini hack I’d filed away, I asked Gemini to search my sent items for every suggestion I'd made, drop them in a spreadsheet with references and dates, then create a checklist to evaluate our work product. It solved my problem instantly.

And here’s the thing — it’s not just me. This is exactly what happens in every AI training I run. We always end our 4-course sequences with student spotlights just like the one in San Antonio a couple weeks back. It’s a great chance for folks to share their innovations, but here's what happens: left unchecked, these sessions devolve into corporate autopsies. People default into evaluation mode, dissecting what's wrong instead of imagining what's possible.

It's not their fault. It's organizational programming. "You didn’t realize this, but session four is actually a creativity exam."

How Your Brain Blocks Innovation

Here's something that'll blow your mind: Dr. Charles Limb's research at Johns Hopkins reveals that when jazz musicians and freestyle rappers enter creative flow, the judgment center of their brain literally deactivates. To be creative, you need to turn off your inner critic.

This finding should terrify every executive. Our entire organizational reward system—our educational foundation, our professional training, our meeting culture—is built on the bedrock of critical thinking. And yet neuroscience tells us that creativity requires the opposite: we need to deliberately turn off those well-honed critical muscles.

To enter creative flow, we've got to turn off the ways of thinking which are ordinarily so valuable: criticism and evaluation. The implications are staggering, especially because most of us have zero training in when and how to deliberately defer judgment.

Here's the sobering truth: we've built entire careers on being good at the wrong thing. You've been rewarded for finding flaws, not possibilities. Promoted for critical thinking, not creative wondering. And now, in the age of AI, that very skill set is becoming your biggest liability.

The Real Cost of Critical Thinking

This isn't just a nice-to-have mindset shift. Organizations that default to evaluation are accidentally murdering their next breakthrough.

Remember Adam at the National Park Service? He built a tool in 45 minutes that's saving thousands of days of labor annually. But that only happened because Cheryl Eckhardt had created a community where people felt safe to share wild ideas instead of getting them critiqued to death.

Think about it: every "that won't work because..." is potentially an "Adam saves 20 years of labor" moment being snuffed out. Every crossed-arms critique session is innovation capacity being squandered.

The biggest barrier to AI transformation isn't technical—it's psychological. We're limited by our own defaults and cognitive biases. And organizational norms? They're just human biases on steroids.

The Leadership Move That Unlocks Innovation

Here's how I now launch every showcase:

"We're gonna hear from some of your amazing colleagues today. Let’s be clear on your KPI. What are you shooting for as an audience member? A well-reasoned critique? No. It is three new ideas you've never thought of per colleague. I want you to think, ‘I have left this meeting and failed if I don't have 12 post-its worth of new ideas.’"

Then I literally make them lay out blank Post-it notes on the table.

Yes, it sounds patronizing, but hear me out. In a room of 100 people, maybe one person initially picks up the Post-its. "Is this microphone on?" I’ll ask. "I actually want you to pick up Post-its."

But here's the “leadership” part: I continue, "I'm going to do it too. And if you come look, you can see whether I filled in my post-its."

And then I do. I listen sparkably right alongside my students. Every time. In that session with the Spurs, I actually thought of nine things I'd never considered before—because I was listening sparkably, not critically.

The physical Post-its aren't just cute theater. They're a forcing function that transforms passive listening into active imagination. It's the difference between spectating and participating.

Leadership Script (Copy-Paste for Your Next Agenda): "Before we evaluate any AI demos today, we're going to practice sparkable listening. Each person will write down three things the demos make them think of for their own work. We'll share these first, then discuss concerns."

The Doing Gap: Stop Collecting, Start Trying

But being sparkable isn't enough. As I've warned about "empty AI calories," accumulating more ideas without action is just knowledge sugar that'll crash.

The question isn't "What have you heard about AI?" It's "What have you tried?"

The uncomfortable truth is, perhaps you don't have new ideas because you haven't tried the old ones. How many AI use cases have you nodded appreciatively at, but never actually attempted?

You need two steps:

Step 1: Listen Sparkably

• Next time you attend a share-out, replace your default "What do I think of this?" with "What does this make me think of?"

• Set a failure minimum: if you don't generate at least three new ideas, consider it a personal failure of imagination

• Remember: you're not evaluating whether colleagues have good ideas—you're using their ideas as fuel for your creative fire

Step 2: Try Immediately Block 15 minutes daily to try one thing from your wonder list. Don't wait for the perfect use case. Start with the obvious ones you've been collecting. (I’ve already got my next experiment queued up, inspired by a recent LinkedIn post from an engineer at OpenAI.)

Communities: Your Innovation Engine

Individual sparkable listening is powerful. But innovative leaders recognize that opportunities for listening don’t happen in a vacuum. They create communities of practice, mutual imagination-sparking engines that accelerate collective intelligence greater than any individual can on their own.

This is especially true with AI, where the landscape changes weekly and no one person can keep up with everything. When conveners like National Park Service hero Cheryl Eckhardt create spaces for sharing and learning, individual innovators become organizational transformers.

The reason we gather trailblazers together isn't efficiency—we could do everything asynchronously. It's because there's social and imaginative value in sharing work to spark possibility.

The Question That Unlocks Possibility

Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling nailed it: "No matter how heroic a man's imagination, he can never think of that which would never occur to him."

The examples I share in keynotes often cause some folks to wonder, "Could it (do xyz)...?" That’s the power of real examples: they spark possibility. As Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, told us on Beyond the Prompt, folks start to say, “Huh, I wonder what else I could try this for…” That's SO important. The answer is almost certainly "Yes!" or at least "It's worth trying!" But the problem is, many don't have a question.

You haven't wondered about what AI could do for you specifically. And if you're not wondering, you're not sparking.

During and after my classes and keynotes, folks imagine stuff I've never thought of. I'm the "expert," right? But I haven't thought of it because they bring their unique context and perspective. That's what you have to do: wonder, then try.

How to Spark Imagination in Your Team

Create AI Show-and-Tell Sessions: Schedule monthly meetings where the explicit goal is imagination-sparking, not evaluation. Like Cheryl's monthly office hours, like the Spurs GPT showcase, create spaces where people feel safe to share experiments and wild ideas.

Try This Physical Hack: At your next AI showcase, literally distribute 12 blank Post-it notes to each person. Tell them: "Your KPI is to fill these. If you leave any blank, we failed to spark your imagination."

Model the Behavior: Fill out your own Post-its. Show people it's safe to wonder by wondering yourself. When someone shares a wild idea, respond with "That makes me think of..." not "The problem with that is..."

The Stakes Are Higher Than You Think

Right now, someone in your organization has the context and perspective to imagine your next breakthrough AI application. But they're sitting in meetings with crossed arms, waiting for permission to wonder.

The question isn't whether your industry will be transformed by AI. It's whether you'll be the one doing the transforming or watching competitors who learned to listen sparkably.

Every critique not only kills a potential idea — it trains your culture to stop imagining altogether. That’s the real cost: not just one lost breakthrough, but an organization that forgets how to wonder.

So I'll ask again: What's your question?

Because in a world where anyone can prompt ChatGPT for average knowledge, the only thing that sets you apart is your ability to imagine something that's never occurred to anyone else.

Your Next Five Minutes:

1. Open your calendar

2. Block 15 minutes titled "AI Wonder Experiment"

3. Write down one AI use case you've heard about but never tried

4. Try it today

5. Share what you discover with one colleague

Stop evaluating. Start wondering. Stop accumulating. Start trying.

The future belongs to the sparkable—those who listen with imagination, not judgment.

The next time you see crossed arms in a demo, don’t watch innovation die — spark it back to life with a question.

Related: Try This Now to Build AI Muscles
Related: Turn Off Critical Thinking

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