Starting with better questions (and billionaires feuding on social media)

16 Jun

If we want better thinking, we need to ask better questions.

And post-pandemic, we need to do this more than ever. Salone del Mobile, the annual furniture fair in Milan that gives us a glimpse into the design trends that will influence our lives and homes, has just finished. Even this global bastion of design inspiration seems this year to have suffered from a loss of the bold confidence that it is famous for. The new, inspired, hopeful ideas were largely missing. We rely on designers in places like Salone to push the envelope and challenge our assumptions about the way things are designed.

But this year, there was a circus tent. A stand selling barbeques. Even famous British designer Tom Dixon held a retrospective instead of something new and exciting.

Why seems a good question to ask at this point.

This week, Fortune published an article pronouncing that summer would decide the fate of working from home (oh unless there was another covid surge in the fall). As if this wasn’t peculiar enough, the argument on office vs home was rocket-fuelled this week by Elon Musk who would have us believe that the future of work is in fact 5 days and 40 hours a week in the office. And despite some light-hearted social media banter in response, Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar wasn’t joking when he said Musk’s comments were taking us back to the 1950s (and then offered anyone from Tesla who didn’t like Musk’s directive a job at Atlassian).

But the message from Musk (and others in the ‘work can only happen in the office’ club) was more disturbing. Musk opined that anyone who chooses to work outside the office is inherently lazy and that nothing innovative or great can be achieved by companies who let their staff work somewhere other than the office.

And Musk isn’t alone. In 2021, another outspoken billionaire, Australia’s Clive Palmer told a business lunch that bosses that who let their staff work from home were parasites.

The pandemic has cracked open our entire paradigm around how we work and live, and while there are naturally unknowns, it appears this seismic shift has left many reeling in terror.

Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler, the author of bestselling books on participative leadership and corporate re-engineering, once said we need to ask why much more often, and that many ideas or plans in business will fall apart after the third ‘why’.

Asking a lot of questions can be career-limiting. We might be horrified or left shaking our heads if we really scratched the surface on many of the decisions we make in business. Sometimes we are too tired. Sometimes we don’t want to know the answer.

Better questions might lead us somewhere we haven’t realized we need to be. Or to avoid ending up in places we really don’t want to be.

Raging at the ends of the continuum takes our attention away from thinking in a different way. The conversation is much larger than the office versus WFH. McMansion or tiny home.