You need questions. Forget about the answers - "Nobody Number One," Over the Rhine
The paragraphs below reminded me of the lyric above from Over the Rhine, and go to the nature of addressing complex, or wicked, problems. Those kinds of problems don't suffer from a shortage of answers. Those kind of problems have a lot of answers because the questions are lousy.
In his new article How Constraints Force Us to Be More Creative, Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. notes that creativity 'involves variability — different ways of doing things' but also 'involves constraints, which can either promote or preclude creativity.'
He continues, 'In many domains, there are issues that have not yet been resolved, questions that have not yet been posed, and problems that have no obvious solution. These ill-structured problems require a creative approach. Paradoxically, when people are given free reign to solve a problem, they tend to be wholly uncreative, focusing on what’s worked best in the past. This is due to the fundamental nature of human cognition: to imagine the future we generate what we already know from the past.... [S]uch freedom can hinder creativity, whereas the strategic use of constraints can promote creativity. By using constraints, reliable responses are precluded and novel surprising ones are encouraged.'
Wayne