Here is an excerpt from an article written by Warren Berger for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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How do Google, Facebook and IDEO jumpstart the process that leads to innovation? Often by using the same three words: How Might We. Some of the most successful companies in business today are known for tackling difficult creative challenges by first asking, How might we improve X … or completely re-imagine Y… or find a new way to accomplish Z?

It’s not complicated: The “how might we” approach to innovation ensures that would-be innovators are asking the right questions and using the best wording. Proponents of this increasingly popular practice say it’s surprisingly effective — and that it can be seen as a testament to the power of language in helping to spark creative thinking and freewheeling collaboration.

When people within companies try to innovate, they often talk about the challenges they’re facing by using language that can inhibit creativity instead of encouraging it, says the business consultant Min Basadur, who has taught the How Might We (HMW) form of questioning to companies over the past four decades. “People may start out asking, ‘How can we do this,’ or ‘How should we do that?,'” Basadur explained to me. “But as soon as you start using words like can and should, you’re implying judgment: Can we really do it? And should we?” By substituting the word might, he says, “you’re able to defer judgment, which helps people to create options more freely, and opens up more possibilities.”

Tim Brown, the CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO, says that when his company takes on a design challenge of almost any type — and IDEO does everything from designing new products to envisioning new ways to deliver healthcare — it invariably starts by asking How Might We. Brown observes that within the phrase, each of those three words plays a role in spurring creative problem solving. “The ‘how’ part assumes there are solutions out there — it provides creative confidence,” Brown said to me “‘Might’ says we can put ideas out there that might work or might not — either way, it’s OK. And the ‘we’ part says we’re going to do it together and build on each other’s ideas.”

Although the HMW process has been used at IDEO for a number of years, its origins can be traced back to Basadur and his early days as a creative manager at Procter & Gamble. In the early-1970s, the company’s marketers were working themselves into a lather as they tried to compete with Colgate-Palmolive’s popular new soap product, Irish Spring, which featured a green stripe and an appealing “refreshment” promise.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Warren Berger is creator and editor of the blog “A More Beautiful Question,” which examines the relationship between questioning and innovation. His book of the same title will be published next year by Bloomsbury. To check out his other articles, please click here.