The Question is More Valuable then the Answer

Recently I had a discussion with someone in my company. I was talking about the our team and how things we going, and the challenge of all of these new things we needed to work on.

I said we needed to structure things better because there were so many unanswered questions we needed to address before we began a design.

'We spend more then half the time asking people questions and getting answers'

He looked at me and said:

'Ya know, your group has kinda a reputation of asking a lot of questions. This could turn some people off...'

Island Hopping

Almost 25 years ago, I found myself sitting on a beach on the east coast of Ireland. I was with my good friend Rick who I studied together with at the University. We both had more or less quit our ‘first real’ jobs in Washington D.C. and decided to to take our savings and hit the road in Europe. Ireland was our first stop.

After consuming a decent portion of a bottle of Paddy’s Irish whisky we started to talk about jobs and the future. Rick studied English and Drama so he always had a flare for describing things well (in contrast to my Architect/Engineering view of the world).