Questions

*/By Rick Nason, PhD, CFA
Partner, RSD Solutions Inc/*

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I had dinner last week with a relatively new alumnus from the MBA program
that I teach in.  Meeting with alumni is such a wonderful thrill.  The
former students are always quick to tell me what they learned from me and the
other professors, and most valuable for me (from a self-learning perspective)
is to hear from them what they did not learn but wish they had learned.

This young fellow is particularly bright, but also speaks his mind – which
makes him very refreshing in this age of political correctness.  The comment
he made to me that has occupied my mind since the meeting is: "whenever I
went to you with a question, you always responded by giving me more
questions.  You never gave me an answer, but through some strange process I
always seemed to have a better idea of what to do after to seeing you.  But
it was so frustrating!"

I never really thought about things in quite the way that the student put it,
but after staring at the hotel ceiling for the entire night thinking through
what he said I came to the conclusion of:  "so what?!  The issues got
resolved."

As I thought about it further though, a better way of assessing the situation
came to me.  As I said, this alumnus is a particularly bright young man. 
Whenever he had a question it was always a high caliber question, full of
complexity.  (The simple questions he had the intellect and ambition to
solve himself.)  I realized that "high caliber, complex questions", do
not have simple answers.  You cannot answer them in a definitive manner. 
The best you can do to solve them - to get ideas about how to manage these
problems – is to try to develop some concepts.  And the best way to
develop complex concepts is to ask some complex questions that probe around
the initial problem or question.

We have become too accustomed to looking for answers on Google, or from a
consultant or expert.  If the original question is a really good "high
caliber, complex question", then perhaps the best answer is a set of more
thought provoking, concept developing questions!  It might be "so
frustrating" to work this way, but it is the only way I know of how to deal
with really great problems and issues.


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