Ask stupid questions
June, 2021
In any business, industry or area there’s always a certain way things are done - simply because they’re just done like that. There may be problems with the way things are done, but they’ve been there for so long, people no longer recognize them as problems. They’re just there, a part of the way things work.
**“You see, but you do not observe”
- Sherlock Holmes*** (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia)
Like dr. Watson, we usually see things, but we do not observe them.
But if you ask questions like “why are we doing it like that?”, “why is this happening?”, or “why is that there?”, you’ll dig out the things that people have just gotten used to and are not thinking about anymore.
This principle comes in many forms: “Ask obvious questions”, “Look at the assumptions”, “Look at the problem from first principles”, or just “Ask stupid questions”.
Let’s call these the stupid questions. Stupid, not because the questions are stupid, but because you may look stupid by asking them - because the answers are “obvious”.
And it’s when the answers are obvious, but you know there’s something wrong, that these stupid questions are valuable. If the “obvious” answers are: “it’s always been done this way”, “it’s just how we do it” or “it’s how it is”, these are not stupid questions. They are in fact very valuable questions.
Valuable and hard. Because if you want to do something about the problems you find, you’ll have to break out of your existing habits and ways of working. It will take effort, and it will feel risky.
The outsiders’ favourite questions
When entire industries are disrupted, it’s often by an outsider. Outsiders are not weighted down with the existing dogmas, assumptions or ways of doing things, and won’t get scored by looking stupid for asking the stupid questions. They are free to start from scratch.
These case studies both disrupted their respective industries, simply because they asked the stupid questions.
Case Study - Nick Kokonas and Tock
Nick Kokonas, the owner of Alinea, one of the best restaurants in the world, has disrupted the restaurant industry by asking stupid questions about the way Alinea worked. Here are the stupid, obvious questions he asked.
“Why are the tables empty when we have 100 people on the waitlist”?
Every restaurant is simultaneously overbooked and having tables missing in the restaurant. The entire industry works like that. They lie to you and tell you they have a table for 8pm, when they know it’s only available after 9pm, because if they told you 9, you would go to the restaurant next door that told you 8 (and still didn’t seat you until 9pm).
It also works the other way around. A guest would book a table for 4 and only show up with 2, or they don’t show up at all. So Nick thought:
“Why don’t we take a deposit on the reservation”?
Nobody thought it could wourk, and it took Nick 5 years of thinking “I think this could work”, before he finally did it when they opened a new restaurant. It was so successful that he started Tock to get this, and other ideas, out to the entire restaurant industry.
“Why is the restaurant full on Saturdays and empty on Mondays”?
Everybody knows that mondays and tuesdays are less busy than fridays and saturdays. Why do we have the same price for monday as saturday? By lowering the price on monday, more people could come and eat, and by increasing them on saturday, you’ll gain a premium for the busiest day. And overall having a more even workload.
Case Study - Elon Musk and SpaceX
When Elon Musk wanted to go into space, he asked all the fundamental questions. He calls it “looking at the problem from first principles.”
“Why are rockets so expensive”?
Everybody knows sending a rocket to space is expensive. But Elon is one of the few who asked why. So he looked at the raw material cost of rockets and found that the cost was miniscule compared to the current cost of launching a rocket. He then figured out it had to be the engineering and lack of reuse of rockes. So he asked:
“Why are we only using rockets once”?
Surely the cost would go down if we could reuse rockets, and not build a new one every time we had to launch something into space. Elon, with his footing in the technology world, knew we had the technology to be able to re-use rockets. So they set out to build just that, and the cost of sending something to space has decreased massively, and is opening up an entriely new frontier.
Stupid questions
What are some stupid questions you could ask yourself, about your business or about a problem you are facing? Heres a list to get you started:
- Why are we doing it that way?
- Why is that there?
- What’s the reason for this?
- Why does this cost so much?
- What really is the price of this?
- What are we really selling?
- Who knows a lot, but nodoby else know anyhing?