Some years ago, my dad asked a prosperous friend what he thought was the secret of his success. After a short pause, he responded ‘Well, I suppose I’m not afraid to ask stupid questions’.

It was a simple statement from a blunt Yorkshireman but a pretty potent formula.

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In reality, very few questions really are stupid – what really holds us back from asking a question is the fear that it will make us look stupid. But the potential for a small dent to our self-esteem is surely a reasonable price to pay for information that will accelerate our progress?

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Nobody is born with knowledge built in: we have to explore and discover it. A big part of how children learn is by asking questions. Some of their questions might sound ‘stupid’ to adult ears, but all add to their knowledge and development. We accept that it’s an essential aspect of what children do in order to develop (even if repeated enquiries of ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ can become wearing!), so we should embrace our inner child’s fearless curiosity.

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This can be a challenge, especially when addressing questions to more senior staff. In some industries, this can even have life or death or consequences. Aircraft crashes have occurred precisely because junior cabin crew were nervous of querying their seniors’ suspect actions. This includes the most deadly crash of all, which occurred when two jumbo jets collided on a runway at Tenerife’s North Airport, killing 583 people on the two planes. A subsequent accident investigation found that the pilot of one of the planes had proceeded with what turned out to be fatal manoeuvres despite the reservations of at least one of the more junior members of his crew. As a result, new protocols for airlines were introduced which encouraged less experienced flight crew members to challenge their captains, and captains were instructed to listen to their crew and evaluate all decisions in the light of any crew concerns.

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Fortunately, if most of us make a mistake in the course of our work, nobody dies! On the other hand, our mistakes can cost money or be otherwise detrimental to our personal progress or our company’s performance, so it makes sense to adopt the same open approach to asking questions – and providing answers – within any business. If we continue to ask questions until we truly understand the answers, we make it far more likely that our subsequent actions will be more intelligent, and we have a higher chance of getting things right first time.

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Here at Zing, much of our work involves writing ‘thought leadership’ pieces that demonstrate our clients’ expertise, which we can only do if we have a deep understanding of their businesses.

The quickest and surest way to acquire that understanding is through asking plenty of questions!

Some of those questions will be very basic, seemingly ‘stupid’, but we ask them anyway. This allows us to ‘download’ our clients’ expert knowledge, or informs us enough to conduct intelligent research on their behalf to advance the shared intelligence of us and them even further. By doing so, we’ve become knowledgeable in fields as diverse as fire safety legislation, materials testing, hybrid working, renewable energy, poultry farming, and more besides.  

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From there, the skill is in finding the words that provide the answers clearly and succinctly. But without a deep understanding – derived through asking lots of questions – that’s just not possible. As Einstein said ‘You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother!’

And so, we completely get the successful businessman’s willingness to ask stupid questions and how he prospered from doing so.

If we all want to get the maximum out of our businesses, nobody – young or old, junior or senior, whatever their line of work – should be afraid to ask any question, ‘stupid’ or otherwise, and to keep doing so until they really understand the answer.

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