The Inescapable Power of Questions
https://seths.blog/2020/06/thats-a-good-idea/
I’m Busy, Why Do I Care? Slogans capture and channel our dreams. Iteration, adaptation, and the hard work of implementation make them real. Pausing to ask “And then what?” isn’t an admission of defeat. It’s a sign of wisdom and maturity, a willingness to at least start trying to think more deeply about complex and troubling problems.
780 words (3-4min read)
Wisdom comes in a couple of flavors. We all are familiar with what might be called the “Sacred Books” type, which is to say profound, long and complicated. This type of wisdom can take a lifetime to digest, with no guarentee of achieving a breakthough in our understanding.
Short-form wisdom is just as tricky. Consider Zen koans, such as the ageless question of what the sound of one hand clapping...is? might be? was? It’s profound, should stimulate some reflection, but a bit hard to apply in the real world.
If there is a wisdom Goldilocks zone, Seth Godin may occupy it. One of the interesting discoveries of the Coronacation has been his blog (housed on the internet at https://seths.blog/) where he seems to consistently ask short questions with long tails.
One such post, linked to above, illustrates a great point we frequently overlook about the most basic, elemental aspects of change. It was published on June 20, 2020, which made it most timely.
Godin’s insight: When you meet a good idea, before implementing it you should ask “And then what happens?” Godin suggests asking this 100 times, “Because,” as he explains, “after every good idea there at least 100 steps of iteration, learning, adjustment, innovation and effort.”
Whoa, that sounds like a crap-ton of work for something simple.
His point, though, is a wise one. What Godin’s getting at here is one of the roots of critical thinking, and a great pointer to why so many efforts to change things--specifically systems--don’t work out.
We should absolutely put effort into refining our ideas, but always with an eye on how to put them into practice. Bad ideas with good execution are terrible, but a good idea terribly executed is heartbreaking.
A good reason to ask “And then what?” repeatedly is that the answer to “what” may change as we go along. We don’t want to get trapped with an excellent solution to yesterday’s problem if the problem has changed while we were working on it.
One important caveat: 100 rounds of “And then what?” is probably a reasonable take on what we need to do through the life cycle of any moderately ambitious idea or project. For any particular issue, asking somewhere between 3-7 times probably will give an adequate amount of insight while guarding against analysis paralysis.
Notice that Godin involkes “iteration, learning, adjustment, innovation and effort.” If making good ideas concrete were a one-shot deal, effort alone would have us covered. But it’s not, and embedded in his list is the recognition that successful change--implementing any good idea--involves meeting and mastering complexity.
Complexity is the killer of good intentions and mediocre ideas. That, after all, is why negative outcomes persist for so long in the face of well-meaning attempts to “solve” them. If intention were enough to create change, we’d have long-since arrived at utopia.
We’re good at grand prounouncements. Things are gonna change! We seem to be less fond of stopping and reflecting on what happens after.
Have we arrived at the outcomes we’ve sought for the last century’s worth of social ills, for example?
Of course not. What has happened is we’ve arrived at a place where the second- and third-order consequences of our policies have caught up with us in a giant way.
Part of the problem, I suspect is that we’re terrible at distinguishing between things which can be solved definitively and things which realistically, we should just be trying to manage. Partly this is because the second option is often terribly unsatisfying.
Therein lies the rub, as they say.
Good intentions are necessary but not sufficient to solve difficult problems. They are, though, utterly essential to make powerful questions work. “And then what?” sounds one way when asked as part of a genuine inquiry. Express it with cynicism and negativity and it’s a power move which shuts down curiosity and blocks learning.
We also don’t necessarily incentivize honest, nuanced assessments of complexity--particularly in politics or organizational life. Instead of hard-headed thinking about probabilities, we glom onto emotionally-appealing slogans.
Largely, that’s human nature.
And we should celebrate our nature, in all its glorious and infurating complexity. That doesn’t mean giving up on doing better. The stakes are too high.
Slogans capture and channel our dreams. Iteration, adaptation, and the hard work of implementation make them real.
Pausing to ask “And then what?” isn’t an admission of defeat. It’s a sign of wisdom and maturity, a willingness to at least start trying to think more deeply about complex and troubling problems.
We should ask it, of oursevles and each other, more than we do.