The Questionable culture of 'Q mark ?' !

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Playing out a typical scenario from a corporate performance review meeting:

Answerable Presenter(AP): We saw a 25% growth in sales YoY due to focus on training, implementation of rewards program for the team and on ground marketing initiatives leading to better awareness.

Questionable Audience 1 (QA1): Thats good work. Quick question- Can you tell me how will you sustain this growth going forward?

Questionable Manager (QM): Thats a great question by QA1. As a follow up to the question [populary called 'QQ' in corporate world] , what risks do you see and what support do you seek going forward?

Questionable Audience 2(QA2): Taking a step back from the interesting questions by QA1 and QM, I had a basic question- what would be the actual sales team's contribution vs marketing contribution to the 25% growth? [Do we have something called as "QQQ" in the corporate world??]

Questionable Leader (QL): Hey AP, we don't need immediate answers to these thought provoking questions from QA1, QM, QA2 due to paucity of time. Sleep over them, and come back when ready [In corporate world, it means "never"!!] . Also, just think about this random question that just came to my mind -Why cant we look at 250% growth next month and what do you need to get there?"

How relatable is this?

• It just happened with me!
• Not much, sometimes it happens!
• Exaggeration !!!

Summary of the above scenario is that while there were questions which were "quick", "follow up" , "basic" , "thought provoking" and "random", no one really sought any answers! So, its anybody's guess on who ends up looking intelligent post this meeting! Certainly not AP!

The Questionable culture of just "Questions?"

Since childhood we have trained ourselves or have been trained to ask questions and also to spot and appreciate kids who ask questions! In the corporate world, during presentations and reviews, we love to Question others, dont we? In general, question the policies, question the system, question the questions themselves. So, who the hell is going to give answers? Well...Well... Thats a question again!

You can argue- Asking questions leads to discoveries and inventions and ultimately results in progress of mankind. However, according to me, what happens is this:

After posing questions, we get some answers, some remain unanswered and we again question the questions which have been answered.....leaving the unanswered questions just that...un-answered!!!

In my view, this behaviour stems from the collective opinion of our society that 'People who ask questions are smart and curious' . Asking questions is deemed fashionable and is deemed to be indicative of a person's intelligence. But what about answering??? Why isnt answering encouraged as much as questioning is? Isnt it more important?

As you can see, I am a part of this "Q" breed as there are more QUESTIONS I have posed than answered in this post and well....I aint too proud of it.

In our society, we find most things "Question"able but very few people "Answer"able and till this equation reverses or at best balances, we would only be doing the catching up job!!! Lets encourage and imbibe the culture of "finding answers/answering" rather than just questioning and that's how the below curiosity-balance will reach equilibrium!

The Curiosity Balance

Signing off for now....In search for the "Answer Mark" or the "A mark"......Till then keep the "Q"s coming :) !!

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