Before the day · Page 23
Where "how might we" comes from, and when it fails
For you only
The format is older than design thinking and has better stories. In the early 1970s, Procter and Gamble was losing to Colgate's Irish Spring, a green-striped soap with a fresh promise, and had already tested half a dozen of its own green-striped copies. All of them failed. A young creativity researcher named Min Basadur got called in and changed the question: instead of "how can we make a better green-stripe bar?", he had the team ask "how might we create a more refreshing soap of our own?" Out of that question came Coast, a soap that beat Irish Spring in testing, and out of the method came the phrase. It travelled from Basadur through IDEO and Google until it became furniture in every workshop room. Warren Berger documented the whole journey in Harvard Business Review, including Tim Brown of IDEO's read on why the three words work: "how" assumes a solution exists, "might" gives permission to fail, "we" makes it shared.
The word doing the work is "might". "Can" demands feasibility before the idea exists. "Might" gives the room permission to suggest things that may not survive, and on a build day you want that permission, because the killing is the user test's job, not the sentence's.
Like all furniture, the phrase gets used without thinking, and it has taken a beating for it. Fast Company once ran a piece calling "how might we" BS, and the fair part of that critique is real: teams treat the three words as a spell. Write "how might we" in front of mush and you get mush with good posture.
So treat the words as optional and the ingredients as mandatory. If "how might we" sounds like consultant theatre to your room, drop it. "Help [user] in [context] reach [goal]" works in any grammar. What you cannot drop is the scope, and scope is the real game. The Stanford d.school and Nielsen Norman Group both call this the Goldilocks problem: "how might we make the app better" sets no direction, and a question that names the feature kills the range.