“As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?”
That’s the Dodecahedron, from the absolutely delightful book The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, with illustrations by the inimitable, and sadly recently deceased, Jules Feiffer. I’m rereading it for the gazillionth time, having just given a copy to a friend to read to his seven-year-old daughter.
There’s so much in that book that asks us to stop and think about how we view the world and what’s really important (yes, all in a children’s book!), but that sentence stopped me short. “As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?”
How often have we seen this happen in the corporate world?
The right answer to the wrong question takes leaders down disastrous strategic paths. It puts managers into awkwardly unfortunate positions with their people. It drives entire companies into the ground – just look at Blockbuster, who thought they had the right answer, but were asking the wrong questions. And there’s always Kodak, who actually did have the right answer (digital cameras!), but asked the wrong question and squelched the innovation, telling Steve Sassoon, the engineer who invented that first digital camera in 1975, “That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.”
Oops.
Questions are essential. Curiosity is a superpower.
Just don’t assume you’re asking the right question until you explore your options.
And perhaps start by asking the question, “How am I constraining, limiting, boxing in my ideas of what’s possible and what might be coming?”
Later in the book, the Mathemagician says, “The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.”
And Milo – the boy who starts the story by driving through the Tollbooth – responds, “Why is it that quite often even the things which are correct just don’t seem to be right?”
Something for us all to consider.
We so quickly jump to finding an answer – a solution – a fix – when we so often haven’t actually figured out what the problem we’re trying to solve even is.
Learn to ask better questions! If nothing else, just keep asking different questions until you start getting answers that challenge you, reveal possibilities, push the boundaries of what you think your options are.