At school, the thought of putting my hand up and asking a question filled me with absolute dread. Thankfully, things have improved since then, but I'd say the confidence to ask questions doesn't come naturally to most.
If you think about it, whether it was at school, across the jobs you've had in your career, or in a meeting this week, it's probably the same handful of people asking the questions.
Of course, having the confidence to ask questions is important. It really is. But don't mistake a confident enquirer for a better one.
Maybe it's just me, but it does feel like we live and work in a time when we don't stop, slow down and ask decent questions. Instead, every man and his dog feels compelled to have the answer, which is mostly aligned with what they're selling. Whether it's marketing dogma on LinkedIn or a knobhead politician on the news, we have an oversupply of answers and a paucity of razor-sharp and enlightening questions. Questions that have the potential to open up new possibilities.
Let's take the topical topic of AI. In almost every company, there's someone, somewhere, probably high up, asking, 'We need to do more with AI' or 'Let's become an AI business'. I'm being facetious, kind of, but these are vague directives, not questions.
How can AI make us more efficient? How can AI reduce operating costs? How can AI create new revenue streams? How can AI make us more effective? These are all better questions, but they also take you down some very different paths that might even conflict if you're doing everything everywhere all at once.
In my humble opinion, and reflecting on the last 20 years, the best people, brands and agencies I've ever worked with simply ask better questions. You can have all the means at your disposal, but if they're aimed at the wrong problem, things won't amount to much.
Once upon a time, I worked on Coca-Cola at Ogilvy and Naked. For years, the perennial question that nobody could crack was along the lines of how to stem the decline in young people buying Coca-Cola. Cue years of cooler TV ads. Then a shift to social media, digital and sponsoring more cool stuff.
Then it became pretty apparent that wasn't the problem at all. The big supermarkets were reducing shelf space and prominent positioning year on year. And if the parents of said teenagers buy less of it, they drink less of it. The better question was the need to 'engage the system', internal speak for doing something that makes supermarkets give you more shelf space.
This all led to the famous 'Share a Coke' campaign, a 'shelf back idea' as it was labelled in the brief. You see, a simple, better question makes the world of difference.
It doesn’t just appear in the making of marketing communications. The best, most disruptive and creative brands have better questions they answer at the heart of everything they do and how they’re positioned for growth.
I have hundreds of examples of this. Many of which tend to get less of the plaudits, because it's often one person piping up early in the process. But it's that moment that changes the trajectory of everything that comes after it.
In the new year, I'm going to share some data that I'm currently crunching. Sound sexy, right?
It's a meta-analysis of over 100 briefs across different categories and budgets. Yes, it's a small sample, but it looks for the presence of questions and tight problems to be solved versus broad directives. It looks at the quality and uniqueness of them. It identifies where assumptions and assertions are made without evidence. It highlights contradictions and missing links in the logic between what's being asked and what effects are supposed to be delivered.
It sounds unbelievably dry and logical, but logic often gets missed. And if you nail the logic, it's easier to nail the magic.