Remember when someone would toss out a question like “who was in that movie about the aliens that looked like jellyfish?” And you would all rack your brains to figure it out? Now we all just pull the answers out of our pockets. And with AI queries, we get answers that make us feel like instant experts on the topic. Answers have gotten easy to get. All problems solved, right?
Well maybe not. When answers are a commodity, your competitive advantage isn’t what you know. It’s how you wonder. Your value as a strategist, a creative, or a human being who hasn’t been replaced by a script is no longer about the answer. It’s about question.
To survive this, we have to stop trying to be the world’s best problem solvers and start being better problem framers.
The high-res question
Standard questions get you low-resolution results. If you ask, “how do we get more clicks,” your chat buddy will happily generate a generic ten-step plan involving A/B testing and headline options while praising your knack for asking the most insightful questions.
Maybe the kind of content that makes people dismiss it as AI slop isn’t the tech’s fault; it’s the result of lazy prompting. Whether you’re asking a client, a coworker, or Claude, maybe we should question the questions.
A high-resolution question shifts the physics of the entire problem.
Take healthcare marketing. If you ask a health system how to win more heart patients, they will almost always start with a commodity question: “How do we show we have the best doctors and the shiniest machinery?”
The result is usually the same: a billboard featuring a generic cardiologist looking compassionate next to some statistics and accolades about clinical excellence. Pretty forgettable.
But what if you asked a high-resolution question instead? What if you asked: “what is the exact moment a patient stops feeling like a diagnosis code and starts feeling like a person?” Or maybe: “which emotions create tension when you receive troubling health news?” Or “how do you make someone feel at ease in a place they don’t want to be?”
Suddenly, you aren’t talking about best outcomes. You’re talking about emotional intelligence. You’re looking at the fact that patients judge a hospital not by the board-certified credentials of the cardiologist, but by whether they made eye contact when talking to you. You stop marketing the procedure and start marketing the partnership.
The clinical expert solves for the physical ailment. The Problem Framer solves for the human experience.
Beyond the dull question
We’ve been told since kindergarten that there are no dumb questions. Not true. There are plenty of dumb questions. But in the world of high-stakes strategy, the real danger is the dull question.
The dull question is the one that asks for the right answer to the wrong problem. It leads straight back to the same boring conclusions everyone else is already reaching.
If you want to escape the loop of predictable answers, you need a different toolkit. Here are four tactical shifts we use at Avenir Bold to sharpen the resolution.
1. The shut-up-and-wonder window
Ban all solutions for the first ten minutes of a discovery session. You can only contribute by asking a question. This kills the urge to grab the first “good enough” answer that walks past. It forces you to sit with the actual problem until the obvious, beige solutions stop looking so tempting.
2. The toddler inquisition
Don’t just ask why one time. Move between the rungs of the ladder. Ask why a patient chooses a provider. Then ask the why question about that answer. Then why again. Somewhere between the third and fifth why, you’ll arrive closer to the heart of the matter. (Let’s just ignore the pun.) Keep asking questions until there’s no longer a pat answer.
3. Why might this suck?
Stop trying to be brilliant and just try not to be a hack. Ask: “how could we guarantee this campaign becomes a forgettable, expensive disaster?” List every trait of that failure. What one thing do we have to get right above all else? Once you identify the pitfalls, the unique path forward usually reveals itself by process of elimination.
4. Is the elephant in the room with us?
This is the inconvenient truth inquiry. Sometimes the problem isn’t technical, it’s social. Ask: “What is the obvious, inconvenient truth we are all currently ignoring about this?” It’s saying the quiet part out loud. Maybe the world-class care is undermined by a check-in process that feels like being processed into a minimum-security prison. Finding the elephant is the only way to stop wasting money on superficial solutions while ignoring the bigger issue.
The dinner table challenge
This principle works just as well when there isn’t a brief involved.
Tonight, I challenge you to retire the two most boring questions in the history of the English language: “How was work?” and “How was school?” Those are commodity questions. They trigger a one-word script (“Fine.”) that shuts down the conversation before it starts.
Instead, try a high-resolution pivot. Ask your spouse what made them laugh today. Ask your kids what the weirdest thing that happened today, or what they know now that they didn’t know at breakfast.
Better questions define the work we produce, but they also define the connections we make. In an age of easy answers, the person with the best question wins.
