Greetings from Atlanta. đ
This weekâs newsletter reflects on how schools and companies alike discourage our curiosity. Down below, I elaborate on why we should stop affixing long explanation to our questions. And if if you havenât yet subscribed, you can do so here:
Institutional Bias Against Questions
Last week I hinted at the idea of a questioning peak. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 will ask their parents as many as 100 questions per hour. Some of these questions can be dismissed as calls for attention. But most seek explanations. Simple âwhat is this or that ?â questions make way for âwhyâ and âhowâ questions in time.
These questioning rates are of course impossible to sustain. The number of questions a child asks per day will begin to decline around the time they enter school. Their pace merely slows, at first. But as children graduate to more structured classrooms their curiosity drops off a cliff. Some estimates suggest that the average student asks as few as one question per month across their primary and secondary education.
One explanation for this decline considers the exploration v. exploitation trade-off I introduced last week. Once a child accumulates a superficial knowledge of their world, they begin to exploit this shallow understanding at the expense of new exploration. Another explanation considers social dynamics. Questioning may persist at home, but kids will at first be uncomfortable in their new surroundings and over time become aware there is a cost to not knowing - looking dumb among their peers. Others blame our schoolâs tendency to force-feed students answers to questions they never asked.
But the explanation I find most interesting (and surprising) is environmental. This argument suggests that schools, like all organizations (including your company), have an institutional bias against questioning. No matter how much these organizations celebrate the idea of a curious student (or employee), these behaviors will be discouraged, if not punished, in practice. Consider a teacher marching through their lesson plan. A few short, clarifying questions will be tolerated. But repeated digressions caused by a precocious questioner will not be. Students learn early that their natural curiosity is not welcome.
Iâll add: this is not to pick on teachers, specifically. Teachers are handed an ambitious curriculum they are expected to work through. And their performance (as well as that of their school) will be measured on the answers their students can provide at the end of the year, not on the questions their students are able to ask. Rather, these behaviors are native to all organizations. Questioning is a disruptive, even subversive, act.
Not convinced? Consider how curiosity is typically portrayed in popular stories. Adam should never have eaten that apple. Pandora shouldnât have opened the box. And poor Icarus flew too close to the sun. These stories suggest to children that curiosity, and by extension asking questions, is a deviant behavior.
This anti-questioning bias continues in the workplace. Most executives single out the importance of curiosity to the bottom line. It is after all foundational to oneâs creativity. Companies would never be able to innovate without a few curious minds. But in practice, most employees donât believe questioning is valued at their company. Francesca Gino surveyed more than 3,000 employees from a wide range of firms and industries about curiosity in the workplace. Around 70 percent of employees said they face barriers to asking more questions at work.
Explanations are strikingly similar to the description of the teacher I shared above. Organizational leaders are under incredible pressure to steer their organizations toward predetermined goals. Leaders may tolerate questions that clarify strategy and tactics or when the team must address an emergent problem along the way. But employees who slow down and ask âis there is a better way to do x or y?â present risk. Not only is their inquiry inefficient. Questions can create costly messes or sow team disagreements.
Another study by Francesca Gino measured the curiosity of 250 people who had just started a new role at a new company. She then repeated the assessment 6 months later. While initial levels of curiosity varied, every employeeâs curiosity dropped. The average decline exceeded 20 percent. Like the student entering school, employees do not recognize their new environment to be welcoming for questions.
A simpler way to put it may be that most organizations will tolerate questions that enable convergence but not divergence, however temporary. This message is delivered to students and employees not in the rhetoric or values espoused by executives or school administrators but how managers or teachers react to individuals questions. It is inevitable that a goal-minded authority figure will limit divergent behaviors. The problem is that creativity depends on divergent thinking. Like the individual, it seems organizations usually exploit rather than explore. But this work poorly in the long run.
In a future newsletter Iâll try to address how teachers and managers can selectively promote divergence in ways that mitigate some of the disruptiveness they fear. But in the interim, something to reflect on:
Does your company create space for employees to ask âIs there a better way?â
Annotating Questions
A few weeks back I introduced the idea that questioning is a breeding ground for bad habits. These bad habits persist because of a weak feedback loop. Our conversation partner nearly always bears the burden of a faulty question or gives us a second crack at it if our first confuses them. At the time, I wrote about our tendency to leap into any passing millisecond of silence, especially directly after we ask a question. Today I want to address our compulsion to annotate our questions with wandering statements.
The glaring example of this behavior is nearly every audience question asked at any event. These people seem more interested in hearing themselves speak than learning from the expert on stage. But most of us feel an obligation to qualify our questions. I fell victim to this nearly every time I interviewed executive as a researcher. I wanted him or her to not merely respond to my question but understand why I asked it.
We think this is more helpful than it is, and it tends to be more about our struggle to process what we are learning on the fly than setting up a great answer. First, we overlook the strain that listening to a meandering intro or outro (an after the question explanation) puts on our conversation partner. The message we send is that there is a very specific reason we believe our question matters, and our conversation partner must pay special attention to it if they are going to provide a satisfactory answer.
Second, our qualifications often seek to create guardrails for an answer. We essentially believe that knowing âwhereâ we are coming from is critical. But are we setting the guardrails in the right place? I am certain that I have mistakenly narrowed someoneâs answer because of an assumption I made. Thankfully sometimes whoever I was speaking with disputed or dismissed my frame. But Iâve also denied myself insight.
The simple solution is to just ask a well-formulated question and see where it takes you. Any constraints we wish to introduce can be baked into the question. If there is any confusion, our conversation partner will let us know. This approach will also save us time. That is, we will get to ask even more questions.
One exception is situations where our intention - specifically, what we hope to achieve not merely with our question but across the whole conversation - may not be clear. This exception is relevant in situations where trust may be fragile (i.e. in a negotiation or conflict). In these situations, stating why youâre asking a question (in one to two short sentences) can reveal âwhereâ you are coming from. But it is important to make this (short) introduction forward looking - the outcome you seek - not about the past.
Thatâs it for this weekâs dispatch. As always, please let me know what resonated with you or how I can make the ideas even clearer. If you know someone who would benefit from this weekâs edition, please donât hesitate to share it:
As always, thanks for reading.
Aaron