by professor innovation management IMD Business School Bill Fischer – By now, everyone reading this knows (or should know) that you never want to be the so-called “smartest guy in the room.” Surround yourself with smarter people and you’ll all win. More ideas, more energy, more connections, smarter people make smart people even more successful.
But, what about being “the dumbest guy in the room”? Ever think of that? Have you ever aspired to be the one who asks the dumbest questions? In fact, we think that someone has to do this in order to take most conversations to a higher level, and yet most of us instinctively shun such a role to the extent that it often never happens, and we’re all the poorer for it.
In the spirit of the idea that in innovative teams roles are more important than positions, I have been experimenting with a variety of roles intended to move conversations ahead faster and bolder than might otherwise have been the case. My good friend Nadine Hack, CEO of beCause Global Consulting, has frequently played the role of agent provocateur, in team settings, ensuring that the “elephants in the room” remain hidden no longer.
She does her homework before entering into a team discussion as a “designated impolite person,” and then ensures that the “unmentionable” rises to the surface so that it can be dealt with effectively in order to raise the likelihood of project success. The agent provocateur role is not one typically found on any list of formal positions, nor innovative team roles, but it has served us well over many important strategy conversations. There is nothing dumb about this role however. To get to “dumb” you have to insist that somehow somebody plays the role of “the dumbest guy in the room.”
- Is all of this necessary?
- Why can’t an extremely well perceived customer experience ever go hand-in-hand with the lowest cost ever?
- Will our colleagues enjoy delivering this plan?
- Why is our Net Promoter Score not more important than free cash flow?
And my favorite: - How come we expect the XYZ market to grow here when it’s declining in the U.S.?
Recently, when working on a strategic planning exercise with the top-team of a market-leading European media and technology company, I was inspired by Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question, to ask the leadership team to, anonymously, pose the dumbest question imaginable to the planning group, in the hopes of achieving a “late-inning” correction to a strategic plan already in motion.
Each of these questions go straight to the heart of what should have been included in the planning process. Yet, none of these questions would ever be raised in a normal planning meeting, because they appear to be really “dumb,” or at best “naïve,” for a seasoned executive in a complex organization to raise, especially when the plan is poised for release within the organization. Yet, each of these questions contains a kernel of a potentially transformational idea, if only they could be heard.
In A More Beautiful Question, Berger quotes the late polymath, and Nobel laureate, Bertrand Russell as saying: “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you take for granted,” and, he further cites behavioral science scholar David Cooperrider’s observation that: “organizations gravitate toward the questions they ask.” How better to ensure the “health” of an organization than by asking questions so powerful that they require everyone present to reflect on the very essence of the organization and its situation as a central element of important decisions, rather than rushing pell-mell to execution?
The moral of the story is: don’t ever let anyone tell you that “there are no dumb questions.” There certainly are dumb questions, and you want some of them on your side. Whether it’s having a role-player responsible for raising naïve questions, inviting “naïve experts” into your conversation, or even scheduling an exercise to generate such questions, you want to be the one to raise them before the market does.
Bill co-founded and co-directs the joint IMD / MIT Sloan School of Management program Driving Strategic Innovation. This article was originally published by Forbes.com where Bill authors a regular column, The Ideas of Business.
