THE LEAP METHOD: A IS FOR ASK
The Question You Haven’t Asked Yet Is the One That Will Unlock Everything
When did you last let yourself imagine something that felt genuinely out of reach? Not a stretch goal with a deadline attached or a five-year plan dressed up as a dream. But something that, if you said it out loud in a meeting, would make people shift in their seats?
If you can’t remember, you’re not alone, and you’re not failing at your job. Most organizations schedule one, maybe 2 envisioning retreats a year: a single day of blue-sky thinking sandwiched between months of relentless execution. That’s not envisioning. That’s a token gesture toward bold, expansive thinking, performed once and then filed away while everyone gets back to the real work.
Rigorous envisioning is a regular practice, not an annual event. And most leaders have quietly let it atrophy.
This is the second phase of the LEAP Method. Once you’ve done the work of Leverage – taking inventory of what you already carry – Envision is where you decide what you’re carrying it toward.
Why Reframing the Question Changes Everything
Here’s a principle worth sitting with: the quality of our thinking is limited by the quality of our questions.
Most people approach a challenge with a question that already contains its own assumption — and that assumption is often exactly what’s keeping them stuck. Take a common one: “How do I get my team to be more creative?” Notice what that question assumes: that the team is the problem. A reframe might be: “What conditions am I creating that make creativity feel risky?” Same challenge, but an entirely different solution space, because you’re now interrogating the environment instead of the people in it.
This isn’t a semantic exercise. Reframing a question is a genuine cognitive shift. It opens doors that were invisible from inside the original framing, because you literally couldn’t see them from where you were standing.
This is where LEAP gets its edge. Envisioning gives you a vivid, expansive sense of direction — but direction alone is vague. The Ask phase is what turns that vague sense of “somewhere over there” into something sharper and more actionable.
Asking for Help as a Leadership Strength
I want to push back on something leaders are taught early and reinforced constantly: that asking for help is a sign of weakness.
It isn’t. It’s one of the most sophisticated capabilities a leader can develop.
Leaders are conditioned to project confidence and competence at all times, so asking for help can feel like exposing a gap – admitting, out loud, that you don’t have it all figured out. But identifying your gaps and actively seeking the right expertise to fill them is one of the highest-leverage moves available to you. It’s not a confession. It’s a strategy.
The lightbulb moment of insight is rarely sparked from inside your own head. It comes from a conversation with someone who sees your problem with fresh eyes — precisely because they don’t share your assumptions. This is the cross-sector collaboration principle at the heart of the LEAP Lab. The person from a completely different industry, asking the question you never thought to ask because it never would have occurred to you, is often your most valuable thinking partner- particularly because of their distance from your world.
Asking for help exhibits wisdom about the limits of any single perspective, including your own, no matter how sharp it is.
How to Build a Better Question
Use the following tool on whatever question has had you stuck.
Start by writing down the exact question you’ve been asking. Then interrogate it: what assumption is baked into this question? Name it plainly.
Try flipping it. If you’ve been asking “why won’t this work?” try “what would need to be true for this to work?” That single shift moves you from diagnosis to design.
Try zooming. If your question has been very tactical, ask its strategic counterpart. If it’s been very strategic, ask the tactical version — the one specific enough to act on tomorrow.
And try asking it from someone else’s vantage point entirely. What would your most audacious colleague ask? What would a child ask, with none of your professional caution built in?
Try this: Write your current stuck question. Then write three reframes of it — one that flips the assumption, one that zooms out (or in), and one that asks it from a completely different perspective. Sit with all four. Which one opens something new?
The Bridge to Prototype
Asking better questions and asking for help produces a clearer, more honest picture of what your next move actually looks like. Not a perfect picture, but definitely a workable one.
A picture that’s ready to be built is no longer just an idea. It’s ready to be built scrappily, imperfectly, and on purpose.
The better reframed questions give you the courage to build something and find out what’s possible.
“If you’ve been circling the same challenge for months, the problem probably isn’t the answer. It’s the question.”
About Natalie
Dr. Natalie Nixon is the creativity whisperer to the C-suite, helping leaders make better business decisions through wonder and rigor. At Figure 8 Thinking, she’s a creativity strategist, global keynote speaker and author of the award winning The Creativity Leap and the upcoming book Move. Think. Rest.: Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship with Time.
Real Leaders named Natalie one of the Top 50 keynote speakers of 2022 and she’s been featured in Forbes and Fast Company. She received her BA from Vassar College, and her PhD from the University of Westminster. These days you can find her on the ballroom floor fine-tuning her cha-cha and foxtrot.
Follow Natalie on Instagram: @natwnixon.