Asking questions isn’t enough

I read an article the other day called "Rocket Ships & Race Cars: The Dangers of Anchoring on Incomplete Data."

It’s about a Harvard case study, Carter Racing, as it was covered in David Epstein’s book Range. Students are presented with data on a fictional scenario and asked to make a decision based on it. Specifically, whether the company should race or not in the upcoming event.

The article (and the section of the book) describes the process through which the students made their final decision, using the data given to them.

Spoiler alert: Before you go any further, I’m about to spoil the whole point of the article. I suggest reading it first. It’s interesting, it’s short, and it’ll make the following make more sense.

The point of the article is that students spent all their time assessing the data given to them, which was incomplete, without stopping to think that perhaps they could request the missing data from their professor. The professor had mentioned multiple times, “If you want additional information, let me know,” but somehow, no one thought to actually do it.

What’s tragic about this is that the Carter Racing case study is a disguised retelling of a real-world scenario. The 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, where overlooking the missing data led to the death of all seven crew members on the mission.

There are many conclusions to draw from this story, but it felt strangely familiar, even though I’ve never been anywhere near HBS. And then I started to realize. We’ve been those students. We’ve been those engineers. Thankfully, we haven’t been in the position to be responsible for anyone’s life, but we have been responsible for our clients' budgets, our clients' clients' payments, and so on.

Solving the wrong puzzle

So often, a client comes to us with an idea, a need, or a problem. And so often we take that at face value, accepting that yes, this truly is their problem.

Of course we ask questions, many of them. However, the answers you receive can be outright misleading if the premise behind your questions is flawed.

This is the trap. Clients often come to us mid-thought.

They've already framed the problem in a specific way. They’ve already eliminated options, narrowed the scope, maybe even come up with a solution. Not because they’re careless or lacking insight. They’re just immersed in their own context. What feels obvious or irrelevant to them might be critical for us to understand the full picture.

They might leave out key constraints because to them, those are just obvious, everyday facts. They might not mention internal politics, budget or time flexibility, the bigger picture, or what they’ve tried and failed at before. That last one is the more frequent scenario and usually the most valuable part of the data. Most of the time, it’s not out of secrecy but because they assume it’s not relevant information.

And so, without realizing it, they give us an incomplete puzzle and ask us to find the missing piece, when the edges are all wrong.

The case for un-framing

This is why just asking questions isn’t enough.

One key part of the process, before we start asking or building, is to un-frame.

We need to rewind. To undo the thread and go back to the root, even if that means setting aside our clients' stated goals or proposed solutions for a moment.

Because if we start from a flawed premise, every answer we come up with, even the most brilliant one, will be answering the wrong question.

And if you think about it, that was the problem with Carter Racing too. The students knew they could ask for more data. But for some reason, no one thought to do it. The engineers too.

I think the reason they didn’t ask is the same reason we often don’t: we’re all stuck in our own mindsets. By nature, we’re limited by our own framing and interpretation. That’s why it’s useful to bounce ideas off others. Another mind will almost always offer a different angle, a new frame. Yet, instead of becoming this "bouncing wall" for our clients, we so often tend to accept the stated problem and rush toward a solution.

And it’s no mystery why. That’s what the human brain does best: seeking solutions. It’s an evolutionary trait that helped us survive and be here now. Our brains do not want to spend endless amounts of time digging for the true problem. That would be terribly inefficient in most cases. We love finding solutions. We don’t love relentless digging.

But as professionals, when we feel the urge to put our solution caps on, I believe that’s exactly when we need to stop and think: “Am I solving the right puzzle? Am I asking the right questions?”