Hello everyone and welcome to Throw Back Thursday! Here’s a piece Leo wrote back in 2009! Enjoy!
Right answers are useless… if they are answers to the WRONG questions. This one point, has been drilled in me for all the years I have spent in University of Chicago. Time after time, whether it was a class on theology, literature, biology or art, the common core (those from UofC would appreciate the pun) through out all of these disciplines and all of the professors was that the most important thing we as students, citizens, humans can do, is to strive to ask the right QUESTIONS.
This point has never been driven into me more thoroughly and felt more painfully than in the past three years as I have been building my start-up. Time after time, I looked for the right answers, in manufacturing, marketing, team building, contracts and so on, only to find that I have been asking the WRONG QUESTIONS.
One major symptom of asking the WRONG QUESTIONS has been a mismatch in expectations. Several times now I have drafted agreements with consultants with the intent of getting a particular value delivered through a specific deliverable, only to find out that we had differing expectations of what such value entails. This is especially prevalent in contracts where the deliverables are vague. I have heard many times that any deliverable should be STARY (specific, time-bound, attainable, relevant, and yours), but such clarity often eluded me.
Another symptom of asking the WRONG QUESTIONS is getting what you want and when getting it, realizing that it is not what you need. Early in this process I have contracted a vendor from India to build me the early version of my website. I negotiated a great deal and set up to explain what I thought I needed the website to look like. That was done, only to realized that it did not look professional–since I was the one guiding the process. After all there is a benefit to having a vendor who’s core competence it is to translate your end needs into correct intermediary steps.
Finally, there is the ultimate issue: the fact that I DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW! I do not know about you, but I have had many AHHHHHHHH! moments in my life. Not the AHA moments. The AHHHHHH!-if-I-only-knew-then-what-I-know-now moments. While I can easily avoid such moments in video games by saving often… no such button exists in my life. Which brings me to the RIGHT QUESTION!
The right question, I am finding, is not what, why, and how but WHO: Who in my network can better ask the right questions than I? Often when we find ourselves in new, unfamiliar situations, we seek to figure it our on our own, our culture eats, drinks and breathes self-sufficiency. But have you ever seen a baby walk straight for the first time? We all need a network of those who, in the words of Stephen Covey, “have strengths that make our weaknesses irrelevant.”
That is a nice sentiment, don’t you think? However… an insidious question creeps in… How can one distinguish between those who can ask the right questions and those who just think they can? I am still looking for the RIGHT ANSWER to this one…
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