WHY you should question everything

In 2005 an Australian Doctor named Barry Marshall received a Nobel prize for medicine. More than two decades ago he was a pioneer in the field of treating stomach ulcers, resulting in a pretty much 100% success rate by combining two antibiotics.

His discovery that bacteria could existing in the stomach lining turned accepted rules of biology on there head and he was vilified by his colleagues when he tried to spread the word. That’s 12 years after he received the highest honour it’s possible to get in the field of medicine.

I mentioned this to a colleague the other day and he looked shocked. He had suffered with a stomach ulcer for more than 20 years, and his doctor just routinely prescribed antacids and some other drugs to reduce inflammation. He left, excited that there might actually be a cure.

So why, then did his doctor not know about this treatment? After all, it’s inexpensive, effective and easy to administer. Doctors are positions of authority and are more than happy to recite chapter and verse remembered vaguely from their residency. Clearly there is an issue with ongoing education. Prgamatically, its going to be difficult for a busy doctor to keep up with things – but you would think they would take note of a Nobel Prize for Medicine. It’s only once a year.

So, then, you can’t automatically trust your doctor. Do your own research and understand before blindly accepting a recommendation.

There are parallels with authority. To get to that position, almost by definition they are part of the status quo. Change is constant and thus, with the exception of a few limited market disruptors like Apple, by definition authority is going to be behind the times.

I forget where I heard this story but I tell it over and over again.

A wife who usually handled the cooking, had to go out of town for the day, and so asked her husband to make the dinner. “I’m not qualified to do that!”, he joked. She told him it was easy, all he had to do was to take the meat, cut a couple of inches off each end and lay it out in a pan of water with the ends surrounding the middle in a rough cross shape.

So he followed her instructions, and proudly reported, “Mission accomplished!” on her return. Everything turned out fine, and they both enjoyed the pot roast. Yet he was curious. “Why did I have to cut the ends off? I can’t figure that out. “ His engineering brain was intrigued, what was the physics of this? Was there something about the ends that needed more access to water?

She replied, “I don’t know… Mom always did it that way, so I just do what she did.”

“Could you ask her why? I’m not going to sleep until I know”

So she calls her Mom, and after exchanging pleasantries explains the situation. Her Mom, similarly replied that it was the way her Mom had always done it.

Now the wife was also puzzled. She calls Grandma and asks, “Why do I cut the ends of the pot roast? Mom said you always did that.”

The reply that came was, “Well, I have no idea whatsoever why *you* do it… I did it because I didn’t have a big enough pan.

It illustrates why we should regularly question WHY. By accepting the status quo and doing something just because we’ve always done it that way, without understanding WHY we did it that way is a mistake.

As corporations, if we aren’t constantly validating that our actions are consistent with WHY, we are going to make mistakes. Perhaps market conditions have changed. Maybe the barrier to doing it a different, better way, has now been removed. Maybe we did it that way because the old CEO liked that approach personally, but with our new CEO we have a new way of thinking.

Always question WHY.