The demise of questions in business
You gave up asking questions a long time ago and have no awareness of the fact.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
— Albert Einstein
The intelligence team put together reports; the stakeholders agreed; questions were raised, but not the difficult ones. Never the difficult ones.
Those questions that confront your current strategy. The question that suggests current direction is wrong. The question that implies past decisions were mistakes. And the question that requires admitting uncertainty. The question that demands change.
Questions vanish in companies because people don’t ask them; it is safer to avoid them, it is a political matter, and it can hinder careers.
Why aren’t you asking yourself a difficult question regarding your competitive position when doing so would mean admitting that you are wrong?
People usually avoid one question, and it’s usually about their main business focus and its current and future relevance. They fail to ask since they know the answer and that answer is unpleasant.
The Comfort of Not Knowing
Intelligence is of no use if companies stop asking questions. Without questions, intelligence has no direction; intelligence that doesn’t involve questions is nothing but data collection. It’s just numbers without meaning.
Therefore, they ask themselves sensible and safe questions like:
- How are we faring compared with last year?
- What are the competitors bringing out?
- What is the market size?
Because these questions do have easy-to-accept answers.
The difficult questions are ignored. Ones like:
- Is our main business now outdated?
- Should we leave this market?
- Are we competing in the wrong areas?
- Why do customers actually pick us?
- What would cause our demise in the next three years?
The answers to these questions are ones that people would prefer not to hear.
How They Kill Questions
It occurs slowly. When someone raises a difficult question during a meeting, there is a moment of silence. People look uneasy. The executive replies with a statement rather than giving an answer. They record the question and set it aside, never revisiting it.
Over time, people realise that difficult questions are not appreciated. The company has an answer for everything, or it tells you the question is too early, too philosophical, or poorly timed.
People stop asking questions, and intelligence becomes decorative.
The Question Hierarchy
There are unwritten hierarchies regarding acceptable questions. Safe questions are welcomed. Challenging questions being tolerated, and threatening questions being suppressed.
Safe: “How can we improve our current product?” Welcome.
Challenging: “Should we build a different product?” Tolerated.
Threatening: “Is our entire product category becoming obsolete?” Suppressed.
The most important questions are threatening ones. These are also the ones that organisations tend to avoid.
Who asks the difficult questions?
In well-run organisations, difficult questions arise from outside sources such as new executives who have not picked up on your taboos, consultants who are brought in to check your assumptions, boards who put forward uncomfortable questions, and customers who leave and give their reasons for doing so.
In badly run companies, external viewpoints are taken in and incorporated into the organisation’s defensive attitude. New executives discover what topics are avoided. Consultants are engaged in order to confirm rather than to question existing beliefs. Boards consist of allies. Customers who leave are regarded as not understanding the vision.
Hard questions are crushed at every level.
The Consequences
People who stop posing difficult questions end up being surprised by disruption. This is because they had not considered whether their business model was sustainable. Likewise, they failed to anticipate market changes because they had not asked whether the market itself was changing. They also did not prepare for competitive threats since they had not inquired whether their competitive advantages were being weakened.
They felt at ease and had not been learning.
Restarting the Question Cycle
We need to create psychological safety if we are to deal again with difficult questions. People must be convinced that raising challenging questions will not cost them their jobs. It is difficult to establish this after organisations have suppressed such questions for years.
Leadership must be willing to face criticism. Such leaders should pose difficult questions to themselves, not merely to other people. They should truly want to find out the answers, not just accept confirmation.
It calls for mechanisms which bring hard questions to the surface, regular strategy challenges, requests for an external point of view, failure autopsies, and interviews with customers who have left.
Most won’t do this. Too uncomfortable. Too risky.
The Intelligence Difference
The top intelligence functions don’t wait for organisations to pose questions. Instead, they ask the difficult better questions on their own. They don’t request permission; they simply provide the answers.
“Is our competitive strategy advantage eroding?” “Should we exit this market?” “Are we building the right product?” They investigate and answer them.
They then lay out their findings. In some cases, the leadership do listen. In others, they don’t. Nevertheless, the questions have been asked, and the answers are available.
Many intelligence functions wait for questions and respond to those put to them. They also accept the taboos.
A Question To Consider
“What is the one question about your competitive position that your organization most actively avoids asking, and what would the honest answer reveal?”
Practical Advice
Set up a quarterly “hard question review” in which your intelligence function clearly identifies the threatening questions that your organisation is not asking. It is not necessary to answer all of them, merely to identify them, to record them, and to note which ones leadership is aware of and is choosing to ignore. Keep a record of these questions over time, since those which continue to go unanswered after several years show what your organisation is in denial about.
Find out from people at every level of the organisation what kinds of questions are taboo. Those in senior leadership know beforehand what topics they cannot talk about. The people in middle management have experienced the political consequences of raising difficult questions. Those team members on the front lines usually come across problems that leadership refuses to acknowledge. Make a list of ‘suppressed questions’. This list shows the organisation’s blind spots. Present it to leadership in the form of intelligence, not as an accusation.
Each year, carry out an “assumption inversion” exercise. Start by examining your core strategy and business model, then ask: what would have to be true for this to be wrong? Under what market conditions would this become obsolete? What kind of moves by competitors would make this invalid? And what changes in customer behaviour would compel you to change direction? Record the assumptions that underlie your strategy, then keep a close eye on whether they remain valid. Once they are no longer valid, the difficult questions can no longer be avoided.
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Key Takeaways
- The Demise of Questions highlights how companies avoid difficult inquiries that challenge their strategies and truths.
- People choose safe questions, while difficult ones remain suppressed for fear of repercussions.
- Suppressing difficult questions limits insight and leaves organisations unprepared for disruption.
- Creating psychological safety is essential to encourage challenging questions.
- Intelligence functions should proactively seek these difficult questions rather than waiting for them to be raised.
