Carragee Consulting

‘Stupid’ questions are inappropriate or irrelevant queries that sidetrack discussions, diminish the questioner’s image, and/or raise doubts about their competency.

You may be asking a Stupid question if:
– You’re asking something that is considered base level domain knowledge in your field.
– You’re offloading research to someone else out of sheer laziness.
– The topic was just discussed at length or covered in preparation materials.
– You’re framing statements as questions in Q&A to score personal points.
– You can’t articulate it concisely and specifically.

The aim of this post is not to label anyone as “stupid,” but rather a reminder that context, timing, and tactful question delivery can improve your standing among colleagues while asking stupid questions diminishes it.

In the book “Angela’s Ashes” the character, Question Quigley can’t temper his genuine pursuit of knowledge enough to avoid beatings from the nuns at his school as they perceive him to be impudent and heretical.

I remembered this Quigley character 20+ years after reading the book because I can relate to Quigley’s self-defeating behavior.

Early in my consulting career I was listening to a requirements session at Honeywell when the team mentioned “EMEA” repeatedly as a pricing region. I wrote it in my notes as “Imea” and couldn’t find any references to it in their data structures.

I was lucky my colleagues clarified it later to mean Europe, Middle East and Africa rather than to have my client forced to explain it to me.

Some questions bear enough significance that you need to ask them real time, but many can be jotted down for self-study or subsequent followup.

Consulting and career changes create the circumstance that you need to learn acronyms, abbreviations and technical terminology rapidly and continually. It’s hard to know when you need only understand the gist of information in a meeting or document and when it’s critical to resolve uncertainty immediately.

There can be naive questions that prompt excellent discussions, so by no means should you avoid speaking in groups until you consider yourself an expert. Generally, people are helpful and appreciative of questions that are coming from a person who is earnestly trying to understand and contribute.

The purposes of good questions:
– Self-development, general knowledge
– Task clarifications
– Challenging a statement or decision
– Prompting audience inclusion

”I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”. Albert Einstein

Long live the passionately curious but please don’t multitask the whole meeting and then ask for a recap.