Book Giveaway!!
20 copies available!!
Leave a comment on this guest post by Joe Lalley to become eligible for one of 20 complimentary copies of his new book, Question to Learn: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Career, Team, and Organization.
Deadline for eligibility is 10/26/2025. International winners will receive electronic version.
There are no bad questions, but there are bad motives behind questions.
We huddled in the conference room. Customers were frustrated with our most important product. We needed to clearly define the problem so we could come up with possible solutions. Energy was high. We were getting somewhere.
Then, the boss walked into the room and said. “OK, but how will this scale?” Ideas and energy came crashing down to the ground.
We instantly shifted the focus from understanding the problem to scaling a solution we couldn’t even articulate yet. Defining the problem no longer mattered.
We talked about marketing strategies. We scribbled on whiteboards. We talked about production efficiencies and how we’d get the solution out to the masses. We talked about how we would operationalize it and the team we’d need to have in place.
No one cared about the problem anymore. No one cared about the customer. We had time-traveled into the future, a future where we had it figured out and just needed to get it out.
This time, the boss had asked a “Time Machine” question. These questions:
- Stop positive momentum
- Are asked way too soon
- Are intended to draw attention to the asker as the “visionary”
A time machine question isn’t bad on its own, just badly timed. It has a place, but that place is usually much later on in a project. We weren’t sure yet what the problem was. We had to get that part right before considering how we’d scale.
There’s a simple fix. Instead of attempting to look like the visionary, be curious.
- Why is this a problem?
- When did this start?
- What have we tried?
- What else do we know?
- How might we articulate the problem clearly?
These questions keep the team focused on the right things at the right time.
What constitutes bad motives when it comes to asking questions?
Joe Lalley is a writer, speaker, and workshop facilitator who has spent much of his career leading design thinking workshops for companies of all industries, shapes, and sizes. Joe has published multiple articles ranging from how to use curiosity to navigate remote work in the pandemic to how to fix the endless cycles of bad, inefficient meetings. Just released, Question to Learn: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Career, Team, and Organization.
