Staying smart by playing dumb, and avoiding catastrophic mistakes
In March of 2018, the BBC published a story about surgeons at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi who were 2 hours deep into brain surgery before they realized they were operating on the wrong patient. The error was discovered when the surgeons got to the part of the patient’s brain where a blood clot was supposed to be, but they didn’t see it.
What went wrong?
Here we have professionals — with extensive training and expertise — who have done procedures like this many times. They take the preparatory steps and get all of their tools ready, but then cut open the wrong patient. How does something like this happen? More importantly, how can such an error be avoided in the future?
The answer is dumb questions. Asking dumb questions may just save us from some of the most terrible mistakes we can make.
It may seem pretty dumb to ask one’s fellow doctors in the OR “hey, are we operating on the right person?” Most medical professionals would likely take it as an insult to their expertise and skills — an embarrassing thing to bring up. But precisely because that question wasn’t asked, the cost was more embarrassment than those professionals have probably ever felt. They made a huge mistake; a dumb mistake. One which could have been prevented by asking a dumb question.
We all make mistakes. More than that, we need mistakes; they help us learn and grow. But there is a difference between making the right kind of mistake and the wrong kind. Knowing the difference between the two, and how to avoid the wrong kind of mistakes is one of the most beneficial things we can learn.
The Right and Wrong Kind of Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes. Some are more costly than others. The hope is that whatever the cost of a mistake is, the value of the lesson learned (and applied) has an equal or greater value. Because of that, mistakes are still valuable — as long as they are not repetitive.
That’s the difference between the right kind of mistakes and the wrong kind. The right kind of mistakes are documented, reviewed, and consequently drive a change in behavior so that the same mistake is not repeated.
The wrong kind of mistakes are the ones explained away as either “human error”, supposedly unique conditions, or are blamed on the victims of said mistakes.
Unfortunately, the wrong kind of mistakes happen all too often. And so Santayana’s adage proves itself true: we who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
How to Prevent Bad Mistakes
The most effective way to prevent making bad mistakes is to play dumb. Seriously. It feels weird to do because we all like to think we’re pretty smart. But it’s often exactly when we think we’re the smartest that we make stupid assumptions. Then bad things happen — things that could have very easily been prevented — like cutting open the wrong person’s skull.
So here’s a quick principle to take into account:
the “dumber” the question is, the higher the cost is of not asking it and wrongly thinking you know the answer.
Take the Kenyatta brain surgery case: it may seem dumb to ask if the patient on the operating table is the right one, but the cost of not asking that question turned out to be huge. If you can overcome the weird feeling of asking the question, you can save a whole lot of grief.
But many of us can’t get past the discomfort of asking the dumb question. So we don’t do it. Most of the time, nothing happens. But every once in a while, that discomfort keeps us from doing the simple thing that could have averted disaster.
So how do you stay smart by playing dumb? Ask dumb questions — like “hey, are we about to cut open the right person’s skull?” The thing about so-called “dumb” questions is that whatever their cost to our reputations, the cost of wrongly assuming you know the answer is much larger than whatever embarrassment you feel by asking them.
The Power of Checklists
And it’s not like you have to literally ask the dumb questions — that’s actually what procedures and checklists are for. Situations where very simple and basic oversights or assumptions have huge costs — like aviation, combat, space travel, and surgery — have adopted checklists. These checklists effectively ask and solicit answers to the “dumb” questions, so nobody has to feel embarrassed.
And before you say something like “well, how’s this going to help me — who is not a brain surgeon or an airline pilot?” —think about the opportunities you have in your life to avoid the high costs of assuming simple things are done. I guarantee you there are some. Here are a few examples:
- Did you forget your underwear as you’re packing for your business trip?
- Did you leave the stove on before you left for vacation?
- Did you proofread that important email you’re about to send to a big client — to make sure you spelled their name correctly?
In all of these examples, it’s not like any of these questions point out particularly difficult work. It’s just that we don’t normally spend much time thinking about these deceptively simple things, because we assume we were smart enough to remember to do them. But when the stakes of not thinking about them are high, it helps to be reminded to check that we took care of them. And it’s not because we’re careless, it’s just that our minds have a lot of cognitive load on them at any given time, and we never quite know what things we might not be able to think of.
Don’t be afraid to use checklists in your daily life. They lighten your cognitive load, so you can spend your mental energy on things that deserve more of it.
Harmful Assumptions
I’ve been through enough training in project management, quality control, and sales to find the common thread running through them all: asking seemingly dumb questions to uncover hidden information.
In project management, you’ll often find conditions ripe for bad mistakes. The sheer volume of work and information — along with the pressure of deadlines and requirement — push people to make all kinds of assumptions, and thus mistakes. Failing to ask dumb questions allows incorrect assumptions to continue on in the project, which results in poor quality, missed deadlines, or dissatisfied stakeholders, because at some point assumptions were made about what the end result should be.
In quality control, you’ll find that you often need to ask “why” a few times in order to get to the root cause of an issue — so you can fix the thing that will prevent numerous future issues. If you don’t ask a bunch of questions, you end up fixing the wrong issue — the one that isn’t the disease itself, but merely another symptom. That causes waste and allows fore the recurrence of future issues.
In sales, beginners often think the game is played by talking most of the time — by “educating” a prospective customer about your product or service and having them listen to you. But the best way to sell is actually by gathering information, which is done by — you guessed it — asking questions! In some schools of sales training, there is literally a method of questioning referred to as “dummy questions” — where you ask questions that may seem way too dumb to ask. And it is often those questions that you think you know the answer to that yield the most valuable issues that your product or service can help address. But you’ll never uncover them if you don’t ask seemingly dumb questions.
You Have to Be Smart to Play Dumb
Asking dumb questions is part of getting smarter. It means you’re smart enough to know that errors are made all the time. It also means that you’re smart enough to understand that the smarter people get, the more they stop thinking about the simplest details (for the most part). And furthermore, asking dumb questions is a smart move because you can learn stuff by doing it that you never would have uncovered if you didn’t.
An even more advanced move is asking the same question more than once. This is particularly useful when you’re asking about someone’s motivation or reasons for what they’ve chosen, or what they’re thinking about doing. The more important or stressful the decision is, the less likely the first answer is the real one. So it pays to ask the question again — but usually in a different way.
Much of what you do has to respect the context and mood of a discussion, but the point remains the same: dumb questions are anything but dumb. And the more you leverage the power of dumb questions, the more you can leverage the intelligence you gain from them.