Chapter 1

Our Hesitancy to Question

Why we always say later, “What I should have said …”

We tend not to question, because we are convinced the other party is an expert, or the questioning is impolite, or we’ll be seen as dolts. These various fears and myths disempower us from finding truth and acting on it.

Authority Figures and God: Yes, Doctor!

The historical, stereotypical fears include public speaking, flying, heights, and first dates. We’ve found that you can add to that the fear of questioning authority figures. We act as if our teacher were Aristotle, our guide Odysseus, our stock broker Warren Buffet, and our doctor Louis Pasteur.

We’ve observed underlings in executive meetings at Fortune 500 companies actually address the CEO as Mr. President, and employees in the hall move out of the way of senior managers bearing down on them as if they were the chambermaids in a Four Seasons Hotel trained to get out of the way of guests.

We tend to imbue people with more than respect, but with an infallibility that would make a pope blush. In our work with hospitals all over the world, the abject refusal of nurses (and even lesser doctors) has resulted in botched operations, prolonged illnesses, and even death. (“Surgeries on wrong limbs” on Google brings up over 830,000 items.) We have a colleague, a former surgeon, Vickie Rackner, who has built a consulting practice on the basis of helping patients gain the courage to ask their doctors the right questions, whether in the hospital or in the office. What is the right question?

It’s any question that’s on your mind related to your condition and treatment.

To confuse expertise with perfection is dangerous in the extreme, whether in the operating room or the board room. We often fear a retribution that isn’t present or likely, but sometimes we do react to curtness and impatience by holding our tongue. As a result, we’re often left holding the bag.

We are inculcated with our inferiority in the presence of experts. In the third grade we had a visiting teacher ask us to name a word starting with “X.” We proudly offered “xylophone,” and the instructor informed us that our answer was wrong, since it started with a “Z!” That prompted a very early and fortunate cynicism about expertise based on title or rank (or even experience).

College professors adore the mantle of intellectual invincibility and law school professors seem to thrive on it. In fact, the narrower and tougher the specialty, the more imperial wisdom seems to be reserved for only the select few, and neophytes need to grovel in the presence of such gravitas. We recall a newly minted political science professor in a freshman class at Rutgers, outraged at students talking in the rear of the room, screaming, “Don’t you know that you should never interrupt an urban intellectual when he’s speaking!!”

Well, no, we didn’t. It wasn’t in the freshman handbook.

Why do we hesitate to question at the most pertinent times and wind up bemoaning our timidity, languishing about what we “should have said,” and “Why didn’t I say …”? We’ve found the following elements at work, which are a lot more rational and manageable than fears of heights or public speaking or first dates:

• The insinuation that our questions are naïve or even stupid.
• The perception that we will lose respect by asking.
• The fear that we will antagonize someone with power over our future (health, graduation, advancement).
• The misbelief that we are under time pressure.
• The notion that our question has been answered and we missed or didn’t understand the answer.
• Normative pressure in meetings from others who are also not asking questions.
• The fear of retribution (it’s your fault, you can lead the committee, you go see the complaining client).
• Not being in the moment (distracted by something previously said, trying to formulate a future comment, and so forth).
• Poor self-esteem (they are more important than I am).

All of these steps are remedial, of course, and revolve around these basic approaches:

1. Prepare for the meeting or interaction when possible. What do you want to know about your condition, the decision, the objectives? Write down the concerns.
2. View the other person as a peer and coequal. You are both adults, and job titles, honorifics, and specialties don’t change that immutable fact.
3. Focus on asking a specific question. Don’t think out loud. Too many people articulate their cognitive processes, searching for meaning while they speak and driving those around them into semicomas. Practice being specific and succinct.
4. Remind yourself of the implications of not asking the question. Will you take the wrong route, study the wrong subject matter, arrive at the wrong time, lose the wrong kidney? These are far greater risks than a question being scoffed at.
5. Eschew perfection and infallibility. Satellites blow up on the launching pad, underdogs win ball games, no one can really time the stock market. Stop vesting others with talents and power they neither possess nor claim.

The first lesson in overcoming the hesitancy to question is to vest authority in yourself, not in others. Never begin by disempowering yourself!

The Mania of Perfection

The opposite of vesting others with infallibility is believing that we must possess it ourselves to be credible.

Our observation in all manner of organizations is that perfection is the arch enemy of excellence. People hesitate, invest too much time, check too many contingencies, and generally drag an anchor to try to ensure a project or decision is perfect before launching.

Which, of course, is abjectly impossible.

You have never been in a perfect plane, enjoyed a perfect meal, or experienced a perfect vacation. Imperfection is the norm, else, we wouldn’t be able to walk erect. Baseball lore honors the perfect game, without a hit or walk, but the pitcher did throw balls (nonstrikes), and the ball was hit to the fielders. It seems to us that a perfect game would involve 81 pitches, three each to 27 batters who wouldn’t touch any of them.

That, of course, will never be done. (If Sandy Koufax had a longer career, well, who knows?)

We seek perfection because we’re afraid of others finding fault. We believe that errors and mistakes are commentaries on our self-worth rather than merely situational failures of attention or skills. (Whenever someone says, “I found four typos in your last book,” we reflexively reply, “There were nine, you’d better have another look.”) The U.S. Constitution has a bad slipup, not allowing women to vote, and God is often redundant in the Bible (“Take your two shoes off from both of your feet.”)

Assembly lines and automation are intended to try to enhance the odds of perfection, yet we still have auto recalls and variances in fit between acceptable tolerances. Yet, the more access we have to more data, the more we tend to be highly imperfect.

In our blind search for and belief in perfectionism, we neglect to ask questions that we believe may not, themselves, be perfect. Hence, we may not ask if a car has a heated steering wheel (ideal for northeastern winters) because we believe the salesperson expects that we’ve already consulted the brochures and specs. We may not ask a question of the chief financial officer because she’s an expert in finance and our question isn’t likely to pass muster when her charts, boxes, and spreadsheets reek of perfection.

A Mars climate device crashed once because the two teams working on it—one in California and one in Colorado—both had perfect calculations and tolerances, which were approved. Of course, one team was working in inches and the other team in centimeters, which came to light only when the craft crashed into the planet after months in space and a cost of $125 million.

Perfectly screwed up.

You can observe the mania for perfection all around you, without anyone questioning whether the focus is worth it. People scrupulously attack stray weeds in a lawn, sweat over 1,000-page reports that may have the first few pages read but nothing more, use tiny cotton balls to clean remote nooks and crannies in their cars. Our fathers’ advice was far more pragmatic and beneficial: When you buy a new car, find a place to kick it and create a slight scratch. You will then know it’s no longer perfect, will know exactly where the imperfection is, and will no longer have to worry about it!

How can we kick the perfection performance anxiety issue? Fortunately, it’s not difficult if you’re willing to entertain slightly imperfect remedies:

1. Ask yourself what would be accepted as success by your intended audience (boss, spouse, customers, members, and so forth) and not what would constitute perfection.
2. When you’re 80 percent ready, move. Understand that the final 20 percent heading toward perfection is not appreciated by the readers of a book, attendees at a speech, members of a committee, or clients of your firm.
3. We live in the age of speed. The dominant factor should be arriving with the best (not perfect) response before all others.
4. We prize resilience the most, the ability to bounce back, to score at the end of the game, to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, and react to unintended consequences.

Perfectionism is anathema to the language of profit. As a matter of fact, it is perfectly deadly.

Figure 1.1 Move when 80 percent ready

The “What Do I Know?” Syndrome

There is an urban legend that the daily reader of The New York Times processes more information than an inhabitant of the 16th century processed in an entire lifetime. Even when considering the average lifespan to be about 33 years in the 1500s, that seems like a stretch, since it was a time of Copernicus, Da Vinci, Erasmus, and world exploration.

In fact, the issue today is the converse: We have so much more to know that we realize we know precious little. In the 16th century, one could be a polymath engaged in mathematics, physics, sailing, poetry, and anatomy. Today, we are highly specialized. (We met a doctor a while ago who did nothing but retinal work in premature babies. Football teams have separate coaches for receivers, linemen, linebackers, kickers, quarterbacks, and so on.)

As recently as the 1970s, one could evaluate for purchase fewer than 20 automobile marques, a dozen television manufacturers, and perhaps 10 kinds of coffee. Walk into a store such as Best Buy today and you’re confronted with several hundred television screens with varied technology. Twenty years ago, there might have been five car choices in excess of $100,000, but today there are scores and Bentley is the most popular ultra-luxury car in the United States. A Starbucks will offer you a vente cappuccino, with soy milk, an extra shot of espresso, and cinnamon. Even the menu choices at a McDonald’s drive-through are mind-boggling, and we often make a rash choice while concerned about holding up the line behind us for too long.

That apocryphal citizen of 500 years ago who had a decent education had a better grip on most of his or her universe than people today with a massive education have on theirs. (And the uneducated, agrarian worker back then had more control over his fate than the high school graduates laboring in offices today.) The problem we are experiencing today in ever-greater degree is “What do I know?”

The answer, when taken in the context of our global and technological existence, is relatively little!

That’s not meant to be a concession or victimization statement. It is simply one of the underlying reasons that we don’t always adapt the language of profit and too often rely on what we believe someone else knows rather than what we know or can find out.

A great many medical and nutrition experts maintain that we know our bodies best (as does the Bible, which first stipulated this in Corinthians two millennia ago). We’ve found in all kinds of organizations that there is a business affinity that people grow into enabling them to make intelligent, seemingly visceral decisions about the business every day, without formal instruction or methodology.

We know more than we think we do, we simply don’t often recognize it, externalize it, or make it extrinsic. In their seminal work, The Knowledge Creating Company (Oxford University Press, 1995), Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi make the case that intrinsic (inner) knowledge needs to be made extrinsic, and extrinsic (outer) knowledge needs to be made intrinsic. Thus, something you uniquely know of importance needs to be shared with colleagues, and something widely known in the company must become second-nature to you.

Even people with such business affinity and intrinsic–extrinsic knowledge tend not to appreciate how much they really know and, instead, often believe they know too little to make decisions effectively. Yet, they have all the power they need to ask the right questions, analyze the responses, and diagnose the situation in order to take effective and rapid action.

Yet they keep wondering, “What do I know?”

Counterintuitively, in an age of abundant choices, we are faced with a poverty of options. The more choices we have, the less likely we are to make one. Smart realtors focus on just a few factors important to the client (e.g., distance to school, view, safe neighborhood), as do auto dealers (fuel economy, cargo space, music system), as do investment specialists (liquidity, conservatism, safety). These factors differ from client to client, customer to customer, but the common issue is to reduce the variables to a manageable few.

Part of our hesitancy to question stems from the fear of not knowing enough, faced with so many options, that we simply ask nothing at all, believing that anything we ask will be inadequate. Women faced with breast cancer and men with prostate cancer diagnoses, under considerable strain and pressure, must decide among varied and often conflicting treatments, ranging from watchful waiting to highly intrusive surgeries and toxic chemicals.

We’ve seen people decide on an expensive house or car without doing much shopping because they simply want the experience to be over and escape from what seem like infinite choices. We’ve seen the same thing in boardrooms, where decisions to expand into new markets, or change the compensation system, or make an acquisition were made because conversations become circular and didn’t advance a resolution. One executive told us, “We’ll never have enough information, we can’t verify everything, we often have to go with our gut.”

That’s fine for betting on football, but not for betting on the future of the enterprise.

Here’s how to overcome the “What do I know?” syndrome of know-ledge inadequacy:

1. Narrow your choices based on macrocriteria. Do you want a sports car or a family car? Do you prefer to vacation at the ocean or the mountains? Are you seeking more revenue from existing customers or more new customers?
2. Use others’ experience for leverage. Don’t become the test pilot, talk to those who have gone before you. What was their experience? What should you absolutely rule out? Henry Ford observed that if he had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses.” Does that apply to your business as well?
3. Codify your collective expertise. What do you know (market share)? What do you not know that you can find out (probable growth in market overall)? What do you not know that you probably will never know ahead of time (competition’s new offerings)? Make your decisions based on what you do know and can find out as much as possible, not on what you don’t know and can’t find out.
4. Apply your judgment. Skills one can buy by the bushel, but judgment is a much rarer trait. If you see a television that is hard to adjust in the store, under optimal conditions, it will probably be even more difficult in your home. If you see other companies using a compensation system that has caused a decline in productivity, the chances are that it will do the same for you. You are not paid to take action, you are paid to achieve results.

This has been about “What do I know?” Our final segment refers more to “Whom do I know?”

Fear of Falling Off the Bandwagon

The bandwagon was, once, the wagon that carried the band during a parade. It was highly popular during political rallies, and onlookers would be encouraged to jump on the bandwagon to join the movement, and not to fall off the bandwagon and abandon the movement.

Psychologically, this represents strong normative (peer) pressure. Once something gains motion, the inertia is supportive of it remaining in motion, and popularity further and exponentially increases speed. We’ve seen this on huge scale with positive effect (landing a man on the moon within a decade as proclaimed by President Kennedy) and disastrous effect (investors frantically trying to gain the promised dramatic returns of Bernie Madoff’s ultimate Ponzi Scheme).

In organizations and among individuals socially, normative or bandwagon pressure is one of the three major potential forces in behavior change (along with coercion at one extreme and enlightened self-­interest at the other). Normative pressure (representing often artificial norms created by circumstances or arbitrarily by management) is highly effective and also quite fickle. The fashion industry is representative of the hairpin turns that hemlines, jacket styles, and accessories can maneuver from one season to the next.

Our hesitancy to question, undermining the language of profit, is often rooted in our frenzy to remain on the current bandwagon and being alert to jump on a newer, better one. We’ve seen organizations launch multimillion dollar campaigns with hardly a question raised about the consumers’ reactions. (Remember the old dog food story about the ultimate cause of its failure, despite massive marketing resources, was that “the dogs just don’t like the stuff?”) As we write this, Victoria’s Secret has had to embarrassingly end a huge advertising effort about its lingerie creating the perfect body. The problem was that women were outraged that the supermodels in the ads—who are about as common in American homes as silver mines—were cited as representing the perfect body for real, live women who had to raise children, work, and otherwise live their lives.

No one in the ad company or the organization’s executive ranks in commissioning and approving the ad had asked that simple question of potential consumers: “How does the implication of this promotion strike you?” or “What feeling does this create for you?”

It’s safe to say that outrage and resentment wouldn’t have been what the company was looking for.

We look around the bandwagon and see everyone else having a jolly good time, and the conveyance gaining speed. It’s dangerous to jump off, and impossible to get back on even if you survive the fall. Of course, by jumping off you may survive the catastrophe when the entire initiative crashes.

For a long time, the bandwagon for cell phones was smaller and sleeker. Motorola was dominating the market when it introduced the Razor, the smallest and thinnest phone at that time. But both Samsung and Apple saw the future as smart phones, technologically driven and not cosmetically driven, and those two firms now own the market and Motorola has disappeared. (The recent IPhone 6+ is actually larger than anything yet produced, and the current movement is to a size between phones and tablets—phablets.)

The bandwagon had been toward reducing first-class seating in airplanes and substituting business and (much more) economy seating. However, following the lead of the giant competitors in the Emirates (Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar), airlines have turned to a renewed emphasis on first-class ground amenities and cabin services. The once-unrivaled upper class (business class) lounge of Virgin Air at Heathrow in London has been surpassed easily by the first-class club (an entire floor) of Emirates in Dubai, and that airline offers showers and private cabins on many first-class flights, while Etihad offers a sleeping suite with butler.

Following the pack does not allow for market dominance, nor does joining the pack on the bandwagon. The old organizational yes man has been resurrected as the unquestioning, don’t-rock-the-boat supporter. Yet, this isn’t what builds great organizations, which must rely on creative tension for innovation, nor successful individuals, who must remove themselves from the herd mentality.

We imply no great malice here. Organizational tropism tends to lean toward mutual support, suppressing dissonance, and demonstrating consensus and commitment. These are prized traits, rewarded formally and informally by management. The team player is much more desirable than the maverick in most organizations. But that natural proclivity toward harmony is dangerous and often dysfunctional because it prevents the kind of pointed, tough, and, ultimately, constructive questioning that might have prevented the launch of the doomed Challenger Space Shuttle, or the reliance on wholly inappropriate measures in New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina bore down, or the launching of any number of financially ruinous theatrical events.

Ultimately, we need to question why we’re not questioning.