The Horseshoe Nail Problem

Stuck on What if?

25 July 2024

Image credit Brandi Hill

I think I have discovered why I have not been successful at being innovative in the last few years. The whole time I have been reading Warren Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question, the stories of questioners have resonated with me, but my experiences have been different from the successful questioners profiled in his book.

When I reached Chapter 5, “Asking What If (to Imagine Possibilities)” of the tenth anniversary edition of the book, I realized what made me different from Berger’s questioners. I have stopped jumping in to test solutions. I am like the business school students he mentions in an example. They are beaten by small children in a decision making task because they use up their time weighing all the What if options (Berger, 2024, p.115). I need to remember to jump in and try things because time is of the essence. 

It is not as if I have never tried to solve problems by pursuing a hunch. When I ran a kitchen at a homeless shelter, many of our meals were sponsored, prepared, and served by volunteers from the community. Sponsored meals, which were mostly dinners and some breakfasts, were open to anyone who was hungry, whether they were homeless or not. Unsponsored meals were served only to shelter residents. I wondered why we could not serve everyone at every meal. 

After running the kitchen for a while, I observed that we rarely ran out of leftovers from sponsored meals, and food purchased from Second Harvest for pennies per pound stretched our funding. I wondered, “What if we could open all our meals to anyone who was hungry?” I asked our CEO if we could test my hunch. She said yes. 

Then, then “how” fell into place when my culinary students took over the extra meal preparation duties. During the How phase, there were some questions about whether we would introduce gatekeeping to the process. For example, asking people from the community to show an id in order to receive a meal, but in the end the simplest solution won out. If you were in line to eat, then we served you. Your hunger was your qualification. Some families drove up in cars full of children. Some laborers ate with us so that their money could stretch further to feed their families at home. 

We became the only place in Jacksonville, Florida to serve three meals a day, 365 days per year to anyone who was hungry. Several years later I produced a video about our successful meal program for a fundraiser. We were serving over 400,000 meals per year. And, we were able to see many people through the economic downturn of 2008 and its aftermath, because I followed a hunch. 

Hunger is a wicked problem. We did not solve hunger in our community, but we made a dent in it. I asked why, what if, and how, and families got fresh, hot meals. I am glad that my questions helped so many people. 

More recently, I have let naysayers derail my creative thinking. For example, a few years ago I was discussing political unwillingness to address climate and environmental issues with a friend and former classmate from my graduate history program. After much discussion about why it is so difficult to take positive action, I wondered, “What if one of the reasons some strong male leaders do not to endorse environmental conservation is that the environment is seen as feminine?” My friend stopped me in my tracks. She said that historians do not make claims and then go looking for evidence to back them up. They examine evidence and draw conclusions from it. 

After our conversation, I did some research and found some intriguing articles from other fields of study related to my hypothesis. I began to wonder if history was not the right field for me. I could have continued to examine the evidence. I could have asked the question of scholars in other fields. Perhaps my research would have led to more questions than answers, but I had not finished my masters yet and my friend had earned her doctorate. I gave her expertise more credence than the spark of my own curiosity. 

Based on Berger’s book, I have many of the traits of successful inquiry-based innovators. I have a wide and variable store of knowledge and experiences from which to draw. I often connect disparate pieces of information to see things in an unusual way, but I have been stumbling over the What if questions so I never get to the How testing stage. We actually have a name for this problem in my household. We call it the horseshoe nail problem, after the proverbial horseshoe nail that lost a war.

Berger's A more beautiful question has convinced me of the value of questions without answers. His call to action has emboldened me to move to How without answering every What if question. With what I have learned, I plan to turn my classroom teaching on its head. I will be starting, and ending with questions. Students will lead and I will follow. If the first How does not work, we will try another.

In the final chapter of the anniversary edition, "Questioning for Life," Berger states that we all must find our question. His question leads him to proselytize people as to the value to questions. I do not know what my question will be, yet. But, I know that the implementation of a new way of thinking in my classroom will ripple out into the rest of my life. I think I will find my question on one of those ever expanding waves.

Reference

Berger, Warren. (2024) A more beautiful question: The power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Bloomsbury.