The question you stopped asking

Think back to the last time you asked "why?" about something you do every day.

Not why a project failed, or why a number moved. Why you do it this way at all. Why the meeting is on Mondays. Why you answer email first thing. Why this is the goal.

For most of us, it has been a while.

How questions quietly disappear

Children ask why all day long, and it drives the adults around them mad. Somewhere between then and now, we learn that questions have a cost. They slow the meeting. They make you look unsure. The answer might be inconvenient.

So we trade questions for routines. A routine is a question answered once and never reopened. That is efficient, and mostly useful. The trouble is that the answer was right for the person we were then, in the situation we were in.

The routine stays. The situation moves on. Nobody notices, because nobody is asking.

The cost shows up late

Unasked questions rarely cause a crash. They cause drift. A process that made sense for ten people still runs at fifty. A goal set three years ago still steers the work, though the world it was set in has changed. A belief about what you are good at hardens into a fence.

Leaders feel this most. The higher you sit, the fewer people question you, and the more your own old answers become everyone else's rules.

Plato records Socrates telling his jurors that the unexamined life is not worth living. You do not have to accept the strong version to use the practical one: a decision you have never re-examined is really just a habit.

Why this matters more now

When a machine can answer almost anything in seconds, finding answers stops being the rare skill. Knowing which question deserves an answer is. And a good answer to the wrong question now arrives faster than ever.

Three questions worth asking this week

• What am I doing only because I have always done it? Pick one habit at work and trace where it began. If you cannot remember, that is your answer.
• If I were starting today, would I choose this? Ask it of a project, a process, a role. If the answer is no, the next question is what keeping it costs.
• Who is not asking me anything, and why? Silence is not agreement. Often it is hierarchy.

Make it a practice

You do not need a retreat. Pick one question and give it ten quiet minutes, with a pen, away from a screen. Write the honest answer, not the polite one. Keep the question, not only the answer, and ask it again in three months. Your answers will change, and the change is the useful part.

So here is the one I will leave with you.

What is the question you stopped asking?