When you think of innovation, you might picture lightning strikes of genius that emerge from nowhere or those eureka moments waking you up from a dead sleep. But what if innovation isn’t about waiting for that one magical moment of inspiration? What if it’s actually about training yourself to ask a deceptively simple question: “If that’s true, then what else must be true?”
Two of my personal interests, improv comedy and detective stories, model this so well. One uses deduction to build a world onstage. The other uses deduction to build a mystery’s solution. Both improvisers and detectives train their minds to move forward by asking the same core question. Let me unpack each practice a little more…
We often describe improv as free-flowing and spontaneous. But in truth, good improvisers are not making things up out of nowhere. They’re performing live deductive reasoning, building logically from what’s been said before.
If one performer begins a scene with “Watch out for the giant alligator!” the others’ minds immediately start deducing: We’re probably in a swamp… if we’re in a swamp, our shoes are stuck in mud… if we’re stuck, we’ll need to outwit this alligator. What might look like chaos is really rapid-fire deduction: If that, then what?
This same deductive discipline shows up in perhaps an unlikely parallel: detective work. My parents visited recently, and not knowing what to do with that awkward time with houseguests between lunch and dinner, I took them to an escape room. As we tried to save ourselves from impending doom through puzzles and secret codes, it reminded me how Sherlock Holmes didn’t rely on random flashes of genius, he relied on close observation and logical inference.
Take his famous case of the dog that didn’t bark. (Spoiler Alert) Holmes noticed the absence of barking during a nighttime theft. If the dog didn’t bark, then the intruder must have been familiar. If the intruder was familiar, then it was likely someone from the household. One silent dog led to solving the entire case.
Innovation is neither purely improvisational nor purely deductive. It is both.
- Like improvisers, innovators must be willing to build without a script, responding to emerging realities and signals.
- Like detectives, innovators must ground their leaps in evidence, patterns, and logical consistency.
And in both cases, the driving question is the same: If that, then what?
Think about ways you might use this question in your own line of work to be more innovative. Here are a few examples to get you started:
- If a customer is cutting corners with our product, then what does that tell us about their real needs?
- If a competitor just shifted strategy, then what opportunities does that create for us?
- If our team keeps avoiding a topic, then what’s the hidden issue we’re not naming?
Start small: pick one assumption about your customers, competitors, or challenges. Ask yourself: if that’s true, then what else must be true? Follow that thread and see where it leads. You don’t need all the answers. You just need the next deduction.
Written by: Amy Quilala
