Dumb Question Saves the Day

Imagine that you are a junior employee at a space transportation company that’s trying to reduce the cost of launching rockets into space. You suggest that perhaps the company could develop a way to have booster rockets fly back to Earth after they are detached from the rocket’s payload.

A veteran engineer laughs in your face. Literally. “It’s clear to me you don’t know much about engineering, or physics, for that matter.” If you are the junior employee, this feels terrible. You want to slink into a hole for asking such a dumb question.

But as you already know, I just described the strategy of SpaceX. To leapfrog the rest of the space industry, they had to ask some pretty dumb questions about the commonly accepted ways to do things.

My original idea for this issue was to write about the wisdom of taking full advantage of your early days at a new company, when you have a limited time period during which you can ask dumb questions without fear of being judged. This is a magical time in which you have complete freedom to be curious, and I urge people to take full advantage of it.

But this got me thinking…while you don’t want to constantly question everything that happens within your company, it does make sense to pick certain areas in which there might be benefits to questioning the basic ways you do things.

To cite another example, someone within the United States Department of Homeland Security had to ask, “Why do US citizens have to wait in hour-long airport lines to re-enter the country?”

From that dumb question emerged a process that lets you simply step up to a kiosk… which photographs your face, verifies your identity, and grants you permission to enter the country. A friend of mine recently flew into JFK from Rome and went through customs in less than five minutes.

Consider identifying key parts of your business that merit a re-think, and grant team members permission to question everything, without fear of sounding dumb.

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I help successful leaders and their teams agree on what needs to change and how to make it happen. I am the author of?Fearless?Growth and?The Agility Advantage .?

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