The Question Itself Is the Answer: Turning a Children’s CT Room into an Adventure

A question itself may point to a new solution. Often, an answer does not exist outside the question. It is embedded within it. A children’s hospital in Pittsburgh, in the United States, faced a particularly troublesome problem. Its young patients were very different from adults: during computed tomography (CT) scans, they kept moving and found it difficult to stay still. Scanning was also very slow. With the technology available at the time, the children usually had to be scanned several times before the examination was complete and doctors could make a diagnosis. What should the hospital do? Many people immediately thought of changing the machine: should they produce CT scanners specifically for children? Clearly, that would be expensive, and developing a new device would take a long time. Faced with those constraints, the hospital asked a different question and broke the deadlock. What was the question? Could they avoid the difficult task of increasing imaging speed and instead reduce the children’s movement? That led to another question: why were the children moving? During a CT scan, the surroundings were dark and the machine was an enclosed black hole. The children moved because they were afraid. At this point, the core question became clear. It was not how to build a more efficient CT scanner, but how to reduce children’s fear during a scan. After working on the problem for some time, the hospital turned the entire imaging room into an immersive adventure, rather like a small children’s theme park. Before the examination, children received an instruction: once they entered the machine, the adventure would begin. Inside, they would see a pirate’s lair or a giant dinosaur. The little heroes had to remain perfectly still to complete the challenge safely. After the redesign, CT image quality improved markedly. Not only were children quieter, but some even wanted to come back for another turn. Why say that the question is the answer? Ultimately, it is because the question changes our original frame of thought. Wan Weigang says: “The essence of a question is discovering that some aspect or part of something conflicts with the mental model in your head. That conflict may be a contradiction, a surprise, or simply a feeling that something is not quite right.” Once you sense something unusual, following that anomaly through a series of questions can often lead you to a good question. Such key questions can become points of growth for our mental models. #得到聽書問題即答案 [Dedao book summary: Wenti Ji Da’an, “The Question Is the Answer”] ---- A question can determine the framework for its answer. When the question changes, the answer that develops will also differ. Often, the answer does not exist outside the question but is embedded within it. Robin: “Entrepreneurship means being able to ask a good question and trying to develop a corresponding solution that effectively changes the status quo.”