Questions

 

We were dialed in on the car radio, as we drove back from our family Christmas, when these words from a Charles Schwab commercial caught my ear: “Are you asking enough questions about how your wealth is being managed?”

I couldn’t help but think, “There’s a question Cook County taxpayers should be asking themselves when it comes to how county officials are managing taxpayers’ wealth.”

Asking questions…

After attending a few board meetings as a new commissioner, I remember coming home and expressing to my wife, “I can’t believe how offended some people are when you ask them a question.”

There were times, as a commissioner, when an important issue would come before the board for ratification. Prior to voting, we were each given an opportunity to ask questions. On one such occasion that pertained to a significant resolution in support of selling school trust land, a commissioner responded, when given the opportunity to ask a question, “Well I’d like to know…actually, I don’t know enough about this to even ask a question.” And yet when asked to vote, the individual voted in support of something they knew nothing about. Unbelievable!

On other occasions commissioners would simply support a motion and when I would later ask “Why?” they would respond, “I didn’t know anything about it but I didn’t want to look like I didn’t know what I was doing.”

I get it. People are sometimes afraid to ask questions out of fear of appearing “stupid.”

Joshua Aronson, an American social psychologist and Associate Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development suggests, “Fear is the enemy of curiosity.”

Pulitzer Prize winner, Dr. Carl Sagan, author of many bestsellers, including Cosmos, which became the best-selling science book ever published in the English language, adheres to the belief, “If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes ambling along.”

You don’t have to be a “questionologist” in order to ask a question. You’ve just got to be curious.

Master questioner Albert Einstein challenged, “Never lose a holy curiosity.” This wonderful line is actually preceded by this wise quote, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

Einstein claimed, “It’s not that I’m so smart, but I stay with the questions much longer…I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

Another Pulitzer Prize winning author, David Hackett Fischer, authored a book back in 1970, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. The opening chapter is titled “Fallacies of Question Framing.” The second and third sentences in this chapter read: “Questions are the engines of intellect, the cerebral machines which convert energy to motion, and curiosity to controlled inquiry. There can be no thinking without questioning–no purposeful study of the past, nor any serious planning for the future.”

In the next paragraph he makes this prophetic observation, “Without questions of some sort, a historian is condemned to wander aimlessly through dark corridors of learning. Without questions of the right sort, his empirical projects [provable or verifiable by experience or experiment] are signed to failure before they are fairly begun.”

I can think of at least a few local “empirical projects” that fall into this category.

Dr. Debra France, who for more than two decades has led global learning teams and studied the impact of culture on learning and innovation, advocates, “With a culture of questioning there is always more possibility.”

Would you believe there is actually an institute that has spent over 25 years designing strategies to help individuals develop their own ability to ask better questions and participate more effectively in decisions that affect us; to see the connections between decisions on different levels that impact us each day. It’s called The Right Question Institute (RQI). They hold to the belief, “Questioning is the ability to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.”

Warren Berger, in his book A More Beautiful Question provides this bit of insight, “One might assume people can easily ask such questions, given that young children do it so well. But research shows that question-asking peaks at age 4 or 5—then steadily drops off, as kids pass through school (where answers are often more valued than questions) and mature into adults. By the time we’re in the workplace, many of us have gotten out of the habit of asking fundamental questions about what’s going on around us. And some people worry that asking questions at work reveals ignorance or may be seen as slowing things down.”

As long as I’m quoting prize-winning authors recognized for their intellectual achievement, here’s a quote by Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the thing you have long taken for granted.”

And how about John F. Kennedy’s remark, “Too often we…enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” Kennedy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his biography, Profiles in Courage.

I’ll wrap this up with a quote from a gentleman who never received a Pulitzer but, like Kennedy, served as a Democratic member of Congress, William Hughes: “If we are not prepared to think for ourselves, and to make the effort to learn how to do this well, we will always be in danger of becoming slaves to the ideas and values of others due to our own ignorance.”

Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics.