The world is full of people who like to ask hard questions. Interviews, talk shows, blogs, business seminars, meetings, discussions, suppliers, business strategies, IT support, journalism, etc., are all about bombarding someone with truckloads of smart and intelligent sounding questions. And a large percentage of these questions simply do not have answers. Recently I was watching an awards program in a business TV channel where a bunch of reputed CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc, were judges in a young entrepreneur program. Each young entrepreneur was to present a business case for the winner. However, the program was going nowhere as the judges were not allowing any participant to complete any sentence and constantly bombard them with questions after questions. And the judges were even firing questions at each other, and answering every question with another question. Each young participant half his age were being torn to pieces with her incessant questions and often cynical. Mercifully the program ended soon.
Today, ask questions that others can not answer is a favorite pastime of many people. Nowadays people take great pride in making intelligent and complicated questions that can make others squirm, shut your mouth or flee the scene. Of course, it is not necessary for the asker to know an answer (or what should be the answer) to your own question. But that does not mean that people are using tough and rude questions with everyone, but they definitely do not miss an opportunity to fire someone who can afford to be rude. Moreover, many believe that only a tough question settles without the need to get involved to solve the problem.
A large percentage of people ask tough questions just for the heck of it, especially in meetings. People often many difficult questions, mainly to satisfy their ego of making others uncomfortable, cover up their lack of knowledge, or to impress others. Most discussions and arguments you observe are all about how someone cheated someone firing an intelligent question. Watching someone squirm gives a self congratulatory sadistic pleasure to many people like, “Oh, you should have seen that bozo’s face when I asked him that tricky question.”
Today, with the amount of information overload is very easy to ask plenty of questions good, bad, tough, smart, tough, complicated, vague, stupid, idiot and trash. However, asking questions is not essentially a bad habit, but deliberately ask questions that you or others can not answer is dumb. You can keep asking questions like eternity, but you will not get any correct answers or solutions. Rude questions and garbage, even the sound intelligent, you often create a lot of trouble. Often people ask tough questions, because they think it is a difficult question to get the necessary response. But the fact is that people avoid people who ask difficult questions. Bombarding anyone with tough questions is a futile exercise, because you’ll never get the right answers. If only makes people avoid you, or give you evasive, defensive and incorrect answers. Besides a shoot the messenger approach will make people tell lies and cover up bad news to prevent your head from being chewed.
Questions second rough and tough just create stress, anxiety and fear for many people. Such questions make people make more mistakes because the brain goes numb with fear. Toughness prevents truth is being said and people will make excuses. And the list can go on and on. Perhaps rough and tough questions are useful in police interviews, but rarely necessary in business life. As Bob Parsons said: “Every business everywhere is composed of imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.” So if you’re a sensible person you will understand the limitations of our species. For correct answers or solutions from others that you need to ask beautiful questions.