The Answer Is Yes. What's Your Question?

Mar 30

I was running an AI session with the San Antonio Spurs a while back, and Manu Ginobili (yes, that Manu: Hall of Famer, childhood hero of mine) raised his hand.

"You know, since we're talking about data analysis," Manu said. "I have a weird data question."

And then he said two words that changed the room.

"Could AI..."

That's it. That's the ball game. (So to speak.)

Could AI integrate the data from his Fitbit and his Whoop and his ring? Yes, Manu. The answer is yes.

But here's the part that mattered more than Manu's question. The second he said "Could AI..." I heard this clatter of keyboards around the room. Everyone was furiously taking notes. Integrate data sources. New idea. Write it down.

I stopped the room. "Whoa, whoa, whoa — y'all, stop." (You gotta say y'all when you're in Texas.)

"Don't do Manu's idea. What's your idea? What are you wondering about right now? What's your 'could it' question?"

Because what everyone in that room missed is that the most valuable thing wasn't Manu's specific idea. It was that Manu had a question at all. The fact that he was wondering — informed by his unique context, background, and expertise — made him uniquely positioned to ask it.

And the same was true for everyone else in that room.

The Thing You Can't Think Of

Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling put it perfectly: "No matter how heroic a man's imagination, he could never think of that which would not occur to him."

Read that again. It sounds almost tautological, but it's devastating when you sit with it.

The stuff that hasn't occurred to you? That's the stuff you most need. Not better prompts. Not fancier tools. Not another AI tutorial. You need something — or someone — to spark a question you wouldn't have thought to ask.

Most conversations about AI focus on technical skill. How to prompt. Which model to use. What settings to toggle. And sure, that matters. But in my experience, the technology is not the limitation. Your technical expertise is not the limitation. Your imagination is the primary limitation. The answer to almost every question that starts with "Could it..." is yes. The problem is most people don't have a question yet.

Manu wasn't trying to spark anyone's imagination. He was just wondering out loud. But that's exactly how it works.

Cream of Mushroom Soup

My favorite example of this is my 85-year-old grandma in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

She texted me the other day (true story, actual text) asking about using AI to find a replacement for cream of mushroom soup in her recipes.

I laughed out loud. If you had asked me for a hundred use cases for AI, I would not have thought of cream of mushroom soup replacement identifier. It's just not in my wheelhouse. (I'm a creativity expert, not a casserole consultant.)

But that's exactly the point. It's her wheelhouse. Her context. Her frame of reference. The problem she's trying to solve. And the answer? Yes. AI can absolutely help her with that.

Your unique context — the problems you face, the questions that bug you, the stuff that keeps you up at night — is what makes your "could it" questions valuable. Nobody else will ask them. Nobody else can.

The Cost of an Unsparked Imagination

Remember that room full of Spurs staffers furiously writing down Manu's idea? Thankfully, I was able to redirect their energy — to probe their own unique experience, perspective, and pain points to generate their own opportunities.

But imagine if I hadn't stopped them. Most of them would have walked out that day with Manu's answer to Manu's problem. They would have left with his use case instead of discovering their own.

That's what happens when imagination goes unsparked. You borrow. You copy. You nod along and file it away under "interesting." And then nothing changes — because someone else's question rarely solves your problem with the same force that your own question would.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, was asked recently why companies are using AI to cut headcount instead of expanding what they do. His response stopped me cold.

Jim Cramer asked: "We're hearing about layoffs because of AI — folks doing more with less. Why not do more with more?"

Jensen: "Because you're out of imagination. For companies without imagination, you will only do more with less. For companies with imagination, you will do more with more. For companies where the leadership is just out of ideas — they have no reason to imagine greater than they are. So even when they have more capability, they don't do more."

Even when they have more capability, they don't do more. That sentence haunts me. Because it's not about the technology. It's not about the budget. It's about whether anyone in the building is asking "could it..."

And the data backs him up. In surveying over 5,000 professionals, I found that nearly 40% have no source of AI inspiration at all — no podcast, no newsletter, no colleague showing them what's possible. None. They are flying completely blind.

That's not a skills gap. That's an imagination gap. And you can't close it with a slide deck.

Your Highest Priority

If the answer to almost every "could it" question is yes, and the problem is that most people don't have a question yet, then your highest priority should be getting into a position where your imagination gets sparked consistently. Not occasionally. Not when you happen to stumble across something interesting. Consistently.

Which brings me to Ben Franklin.

I used to wonder: how could one person have such a staggering range of ideas? The bifocal. The lightning rod. The Franklin stove. Swim paddles. The lending library. The fire department. The Continental Congress. This is one guy. How?

The answer is the Junto.

In 1727, Franklin gathered a group of fellow artisans and tradesmen — his "leather apron club" — and they met every single week for 30 years. They asked each other questions like: "Has anyone's business fallen into disrepute?" "Has anybody moved to Philadelphia?" "Have there been any advances in the sciences that have bearing on our businesses?" "Who ought we to know?"

These weren't theoretical questions. They were sparks. Each one designed to surface something that wouldn't have occurred to someone working alone. And the compound effect of those sparks — every week, for decades — produced one of the most prolific minds in American history.

Franklin didn't have better ideas because he was smarter than everyone else. He had better ideas because he had better inputs. Consistently. Structurally. By design.

Find Your Crew

Inspired by Franklin, I started an AI Junto — a community of practice where a group of like-minded AI experimenters gather every Friday for the express purpose of sharing cool things we're trying and sparking one another's imaginations. We have a call and a very active WhatsApp group, and similar to Franklin's original, the whole point is provocation. Not instruction. Not lectures. Sparks.

It's one of my favorite things I do. (And I say that as someone whose calendar is not exactly empty.)

But here's what I want you to take away: this isn't about joining my community. It's about finding — or building — yours.

Find your crew. It might be three colleagues who meet for coffee every other Friday. It might be a Slack channel where people drop interesting AI experiments. It might be a formal community of practice. The format matters less than the commitment: showing up regularly with the explicit intent to spark one another's imaginations.

And you don't have to be the expert to start one. Cheryl Eckhardt at the National Park Service has no technical background whatsoever — she just started organizing monthly calls for people curious about AI. That community ended up producing a tool that saves thousands of days of labor annually. You don't need credentials. You need a calendar invite and a willingness to ask, "What are you trying?"

Here are three things you can do this week:

1. Identify two or three people who spark your thinking. They don't have to be AI experts. They just have to be curious, experimental, and willing to share. (You probably already know who they are.)

2. Send them a text. Something like: "I've been thinking we should start meeting regularly to share what we're each trying with AI. Nothing formal — just sparking ideas for each other. You in?" You'd be surprised how many people are waiting for someone to ask.

3. Put it on the calendar. Biweekly. Monthly. Whatever works. The rhythm matters more than the frequency. Franklin met weekly for 30 years. Start with once a month and see what happens.

The Answer Is Yes

The answer to almost every question you could ask that begins with "could AI..." is yes.

Could it help you prep for a difficult conversation? Yes. Could it analyze the data from your wearables? Yes. Could it find a substitute for cream of mushroom soup? (Apparently, yes.)

But here's Schelling's paradox: you can't ask the question that hasn't occurred to you. And it won't occur to you sitting alone at your desk, scrolling through the same feeds, doing the same work the same way.

You need new inputs. You need unexpected collisions. You need people who see the world differently than you do, asking questions you'd never think to ask — and sparking questions in you that nobody else could.

The answer is yes. So... what's your question?

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