Five Questions to Frame Your Growth Opportunity

After years of deliberately forcing myself and others to embrace change, I'm finding that asking these five questions at the beginning of a growth project is one constant I wouldn't dare stray from. If you can sit down with your project team and help them answer these questions, you'll set your project up for a smooth and powerful start.

• Question 1: What is the challenge/opportunity we are facing?
• Question 2: What should we know from a contextual/historical perspective? Why is now the right time to try and solve this?
• Question 3: How can this team best help address this issue?
• Question 4: What have you thought of and/or tried already to address this issue?
• Question 5: What does success look like for this project?

Asking these questions will give everyone involved just enough information to get moving without weighing them down with notions of what will or won't work. More importantly, you will have cleaned everyone's slate to start fresh in tackling this issue, regardless of whether it's new to your project portfolio or something the organization has kicked around for years.

So, what do you think? Anything you'd add to the list or edit/remove?

- Clay Maxwell (@bizinovationist)