Once again, we are heading into a new year with more questions than answers. As we wrap up 2024 with a historic US election, wars around the world, escalating climate crisis and artificial intelligence gone rogue, it may even seem like we have more questions than ever. Questions that we may never ask aloud.
A 2021 study of undergraduates’ perceptions of voluntarily asking and answering questions found that despite perceiving asking and answering questions to be helpful, over half of students never ask or answer questions in large-enrollment courses.
But fear of asking questions is not just a psychological phenomenon that applies only to nervous students and others who are inhibited by personal, social or structural circumstances. It’s a philosophical phenomenon that applies to all of us.
And by embracing the fear of asking questions as an existential condition, we can help each other find the courage to ask the hard questions in 2025.
We All Have Good Reasons For Not Asking Questions
Eve has worked at the same company for a couple of years now. And she knows how to handle her tasks, colleagues and clients.
There are certainly things she wishes were different, but changing them is beyond her pay grade. And when top management says they want her and her colleagues to ask questions and share their input on how to improve things, she gets the feeling that they are only interested in a specific kind of input. And she is not sure what that is.
Besides, last time one of her colleagues asked a question in a meeting, everyone looked bored and impatient, and she doesn’t want to waste people’s time. In short, Eve has good reasons for not asking questions.
With The Magical Question Triangle in mind, Eve’s discomfort with asking questions can be broken down into three concrete risks:
1. By Asking Questions, We Risk Jeopardizing Our Personal And Professional Role In The Team
When I introduced the ASK guide in a previous Forbes article, I emphasized German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s point that when there is no method for learning how to ask questions, the important thing is not what we know, but that we are willing to admit that there is something we don’t know.
But, as anthropologist Esther N. Goody points out, knowledge is seen as power in many societies. So admitting ignorance by asking can seem like we are giving up power and devaluing our own position.
And when we, like Eve, have worked in the same company or industry for a long time, people expect and depend on us to know what we are doing.
Fortunately, knowing what we’re doing does not contradict acknowledging and admitting that there is something we don’t know. Quite the opposite: The best questions come from knowing enough about something to see what is missing or can be improved.
So, to overcome our fear of losing our position, we must not refrain from asking questions that may make us seem less knowledgeable. Instead, we must ask ourselves what we know that other people need to know to understand the importance of our question and share this knowledge to motivate our question.
2. By Asking Questions, We Risk Jeopardizing Our Relationships With The Other Team Members
Goody describes it like this: ”Questioning not only involves asking for information, but also carries a command function. Questions are speech acts which place two people in direct immediate interaction. In doing so, they carry messages about relationships, about relative status, assertions of status and challenges to status.”
Once again, Goody makes it clear that asking and answering questions is a power game. And if we know that – which most of us instinctively do – but we’re unsure how to play it, we not only fear losing our personal and professional status, we also fear messing up the group dynamics of our team.
To overcome this fear, we must ask ourselves if our question is important for everyone to clarify or discuss. If the answer is no, now is not the time to ask it. But if the answer is yes, we must assess whether the risk the team runs by not clarifying and discussing the question is greater than the risk we run by asking it.
And if this is the case, we must ask the question no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel. Because if the team’s risk of not clarifying and discussing the question is bigger than our personal risk of asking it, we are not wasting anybody’s time. In fact, we’re helping everybody spend their time on the things that matter most.
3. By Asking Questions, We Risk Jeopardizing Our Responsibility To Contribute To A Common Goal
Although questioning activates our ability to consider, connect and commit, we don’t always ask questions to commit to a shared purpose. Sometimes, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur points out, we ask questions to question the established order. Which means that asking questions can put the stability and security of the whole team or even the entire organization in danger.
But asking questions is also the only way for individuals, teams and organizations to renew themselves and help shape the future rather than simply trying to keep up with the ever-changing world they are a part of. So, to overcome the fear of asking questions, we must remember that the risk of not asking questions is often greater than the risk of doing so.
By not asking, we decrease the risk of appearing ignorant, wasting other people’s time and taking on tasks beyond our pay grade. But we also increase the risk that important knowledge is not shared, important issues are not clarified and discussed, and no one therefore takes responsibility for shaping our shared future.
So instead of succumbing to an abstract fear of asking questions, we must assess the concrete risks of asking and not asking in the situations we find ourselves in. And the first step to doing that is to remind ourselves and each other that no matter how scary the questions of 2025 may seem, we are in the questioning power game together.