The minimalist 3-question method to unlock creativity
Distilling Books - Number 25
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🏷️ Categories: Creativity.
Do you know that exhaustion you feel when ideas just won’t come?
It’s not a lack of motivation. Quite the opposite: you’ve read, thought, and consumed more content than you can remember. You have notes everywhere. You sit in front of your notebook or screen with the feeling that something brilliant is about to appear…
And nothing appears.
It’s happened to all of us. And we always make the same mistake: believing the problem is that we’re not trying hard enough. So we push harder. But creative block doesn’t come from a lack of ideas—it comes from the absence of a clear direction.
That’s what this article is about.
I’m going to tell you about Warren Berger’s three-step method for generating ideas. Berger is a journalist who spent more than a decade studying how the most innovative people and companies think. His work was distilled into his book A More Beautiful Question, where he demonstrates something essential: the best ideas don’t come from better answers—they come from better questions.
If you’re a creative person, keep reading.
Here’s a reliable, repeatable method for generating ideas on any topic.
Creativity is a process, not an event
Creativity isn’t a flash of genius—it’s a process that can be learned.
Popular culture has romanticized the idea of the lone genius from whom a brilliant idea spontaneously emerges, but that’s not how it really works. People who generate valuable ideas aren’t necessarily the smartest or the most original.
What they do differently is that they know how to think before they create.
They understand that a good idea almost never starts as a strong, original answer to a problem. In reality, everything begins with exploration. And for that exploration of ideas, they use (consciously or unconsciously) a mental framework.
That framework is Warren Berger’s minimalist three-step method.
Why?
What if…?
How?
Three questions.
Three different mental states.
Three phases that, if respected, prevent the biggest creative mistake of all: jumping too quickly from initial questioning to the final creative answer. It’s not a sophisticated method or anything magical, but that’s exactly why it works.
Let’s look at it step by step…
1. Why?
Clarity won’t emerge if you live at the pace of modern life.
Everything starts with slowing down and questioning what no one ever questions.
Asking Why? means turning off autopilot and asking yourself why things are the way they are, why they’re always done that way, why you believe what you believe. Most creative blocks come from trying to solve a poorly framed problem from the start. Doing this phase well will save you a lot of time later.
When you understand the real problem, all that’s left is to move in that direction.
Taking notes in a notebook “because that’s how it’s always been done”: you write, underline, and turn pages, but you almost never return to those notes. The more you have, the heavier it becomes to review them. The why? is: why do I take notes in a notebook if it doesn’t help me? That question is what led me to Zettelkasten, a system infinitely more efficient for learning and remembering everything I read.
Replying to emails and messages as soon as they arrive: you feel productive, but you end the day without having made progress on anything important—just running around and unable to focus on what truly matters. Asking why do I reply to emails as they arrive? reveals that you’re reacting to others instead of deciding for yourself what to do.
These are just two examples, but thousands of creative solutions start here.
And to refine things even more, use zero thinking: break a topic down into its most basic, unquestionable elements, and from there the error causing the whole problem becomes obvious.
Let’s move on to step two…
2. What if…?
Good ideas sometimes sound ridiculous before they sound brilliant.
What if…? is the starting point for thinking without limits. After understanding the problem with Why?, this phase doesn’t look for viable solutions—it looks for possibilities. It’s where old ideas are recombined in new contexts. Where a concept from one field blends with another completely different one and creates something that didn’t exist before.
The most common mistake here is killing ideas too early.
We tend to judge them using How? criteria while they’re still being born. What if…? is for exploring what could exist if there were no constraints. The problem is that if we don’t immediately see how to do something, we assume it’s useless. It’s not that the idea is bad—it’s that we’re jumping ahead to a phase that doesn’t belong yet.
That’s the paradox of creativity.
We want new ideas to escape the same old problems.
But at the same time, we hate the uncertainty that new ideas bring.
Here’s a powerful tool for the What if…? phase: option suppression.
By default, the mind reduces possibilities to what’s familiar—what already works, what “makes sense.” Option suppression means doing the exact opposite: eliminating all obvious solutions and then starting to think from there.
And that space is exactly where What if…? lives.
Improving a product or service by removing features instead of adding them
What if I had to remove one feature from the app?
What if I had to redesign the app to be twice as simple and just as useful?
Being more productive by doing less than before
What if I could only do 3 tasks a day?
What if I could only reply to messages once a day?
Organizing information (without falling into what always fails you)
What if I couldn’t use a notebook or a digital note app?
What if I couldn’t use folders to store files?
When you suppress options, you think outside the box and find the unexpected.
Let’s move on to the final question…
3. How?
How? is where your idea meets reality—and this is where many people freeze. They believe they need to have everything clear before they start. Bad news.
That perfect plan will never arrive.
The result is analysis paralysis.
How? is about thinking of the first possible version, imagining a minimum viable prototype, and making countless iterations through trial and error until the right answer emerges. It sounds primitive, but it’s the foundation of science and of major breakthroughs in history—like the Wright brothers, who achieved the first powered airplane flight using exactly this method.
An idea only proves its value when it’s tested in the real world.
You fail…
And you try again with the lesson learned.
The question loop
Every How? put into practice inevitably generates new Why?s.
Why didn’t this work?
Why did it work this time?
Why did we use this solution?
…
That’s the secret of the method: it’s circular.
You try something, learn, uncover a new assumption, ask again—and creativity stops being an isolated event and becomes a system in motion.
You no longer depend on inspiration.
Now you know what to do step by step to reach the idea you’re looking for.
If you take just one thing from this article, let it be this: don’t try to jump from a problem straight to a definitive solution. First, improve the way you ask questions. Don’t force a solution—explore beyond the obvious paths.
Start with a deeper, more reflective Why?
The rest will follow on its own.
Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:
Isaac Asimov’s hidden guide to generating ideas… written for a secret U.S. project
Brainstorming doesn’t work—do this instead: How to build an infinite idea machine in 5 steps
✍️ Your turn: What would be the “minimum viable prototype” of that idea that keeps circling in your mind and that you still haven’t tested?
💭 Quote of the day: “It was not known what people might discover when they felt free to ask whatever questions they wished.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22
See you next time! 👋
References 📚
Berger, W. (2016). A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.
Muito bom. Obrigada!