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I’m sitting in a meeting about launching a clothing rental scheme.
It’s the 13th meeting we’ve had about this, and we’re no closer to launching. Everyone in the room is visibly bored. The project lead is at the front, going on about details that, frankly, I don’t understand anymore.
Despite people nodding along, one question hangs in the air.
A question so obvious, no one wants to ask it. ​ Because, at this point, asking it would make you look stupid.
Well, I asked it.
Photo by Sylvain Mauroux on Unsplash
Why we don’t ask stupid questions
I’m sure you’ve been in a meeting like this. Course you have.
So why is it that, so often, we don’t ask the questions that are so obvious, they’d make us look stupid?
Well, in knowledge work, our currency is intellect. We’re hired because we can problem-solve and come up with smart solutions. Asking obvious questions feels dangerous. It risks you looking uninformed and daft.
Most of us spend our working lives trying to demonstrate our expertise and know-how. We seek trust and respect from our colleagues. We want to be the go-to person who has all the answers.
Problem is, innovation rarely starts with an answer. ​ Innovation starts with a question.
Psychologists call this the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, it becomes difficult to imagine not knowing it. So we stop noticing our assumptions because they bleed into our knowledge. We adopt them as law.
At work, as teams build upon layers of shared understanding and assumptions, they become what’s best summarised with the spine-tingling phrase: “that's how we do it around here”. Yuk.
Lucky for us, there is another way.
Zen Buddhists have a concept called Beginner’s Mind. (We cover this a lot in the Cult of Curiosity).
Beginner’s Mind is best understood in this quote from Shunryū Suzuki:
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind there are few.
Experts are ace at solving problems in conventional ways. ​ Beginners are fantastic at solving problems in unconventional ways.
The most innovative thinkers know how to switch between an expert and beginner mindset.
They are deliberately naive. ​ They pretend they don’t understand. ​ They ask simple, silly questions.
Strip everything away until you get to the core of the challenge at hand. Then use all your experience and knowledge to solve the right problem.
Which brings me back to that meeting…
About 37 minutes in, I finally asked the question everyone had had on their mind for the last 3 months: “Why are we doing this project? What’s the actual problem we’re trying to solve?”
Silence.
The project lead froze. Shocked. Paniced. (He was my boss… I started to panic. Regret instantly set in.)
It took a moment for the chatter to restart, but as soon as we were all aligned on what we were actually trying to achieve, the ideas flowed. No, they poured.
We made more progress in that meeting than in the prior 3 months. And it paved the way for the MVP version to be launched.
Why were we launching a clothing rental scheme?
To make specialist outdoor expedition kit financially accessible, so more people can access the outdoors.
​Rab’s Rental Scheme was the first to launch in the UK, and has since expanded from only expedition equipment to more basic outdoor apparel and packs. Making it possible for someone to rent a high-quality waterproof jacket to go climb Snowdon or Ben Nevis, without the price tag.
Seriously, you can rent a proper good waterproof jacket from ÂŁ29!
Success came down to asking a dumb question…
So next time you find yourself stuck in a never-ending meeting or strategy session, try being the most stupid person in the room.
If you need some inspiration, here’s a menu of questions to try:
Can you explain that more simply?
Can you sketch that?
How would you explain this to a twelve-year-old?
What problem are we (really) trying to solve?
Why does this matter?
What would happen if we didn’t do this?
How do we know that’s true?
What are we assuming here?
If we were starting from scratch, would we do it this way?
What’s the simplest version of this?
What could we remove?
Imagine you’re a customer, what do you want?
What would someone from a completely different industry ask?
To get what others don’t, you gotta be willing to do what others won’t.
Most people spend their careers trying to sound intelligent. ​ ​The people who create change are often willing to sound stupid.
The obvious question isn't usually obvious at all. Because everyone else has stopped seeing it.
What’s the question nobody’s asking in your organisation right now?
Join purpose-driven founders, marketers and changemakers learning how to use storytelling and behavioural insights to spark change in business, the world, and themselves. 5 minutes, every week.
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