Options are good. The power of “And what else?” is that it’s the
quickest and easiest way to uncover and create new possibilities.
But having lots and lots and lots of options isn’t always best.
Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice (he gives a
go o d TED Talk of the same name), brought to light a study of
consumers in a grocery store. It was Jam Day, and one sample
table had six varieties; the other, twenty-four. While the table with
twenty-four types of jam was more popular, consumers sampling
from the table of six flavours were ten times more likely to
actually buy jam. The overwhelm of twenty-four flavours created
decision-making paralysis.
Neuroscience has something useful to add to this conversation.
The starting point for it was a 1956 paper by George A. Miller
whose title tells you exactly what its conclusion was: “The Magical
Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity
for Processing Information.” Science has whittled that number
down over time, so now it’s generally assumed that four is actually
the ideal number at which we can chunk information. In some
ways, it’s as if our unconscious brain counts like this: one, two,
three, four... lots. That probably explains why we can remember
the names of people in four-person bands, but not of those in
bands of five or more.
So as you ask, “And what else?” the goal isn’t to generate a
bazillion options. It’s to see what ideas that person already has
(while effectively stopping you from leaping in with your own
ideas). If you get three to five answers, then you’ve made great
progress indeed.