[July 02, 2015] For the military, superior communications is one of the greatest advantages one can have over the enemy. When I joined the army, we talked with others using a short-range FM radio. Communications were based on the radio and required the person we wanted to speak to being in a certain place – relatively close proximity and unimpeded by signal-blocking terrain. Elsewhere, engineers at Motorola were thinking about this problem and were asking the right question, “Why is it that when we want to call and talk to a person, we have to call a place?”
What we did not know in 1960s was that Motorola was working on the concept of talking to people where location and terrain were no longer relevant. Consequently, in 1973 the company came out with the first cell phone called the DynaTAC 8000X. 1 This first commercial cell phone began a new era of communications where we could speak with a person, not a place like the office, a house, or in a car.2 In addition, the person making the call could also be moving around.
And so it is with the most successful of leaders … they will always be asking the right question. This requires a keen ear for information, creativeness in thinking, and a penchant for seeing realistic ideas through to fruition. Asking the right question not only helps clarify issues in development of strategies and plans, it also help focus the teamwork necessary to get us there. It illuminates what the facts are, shows us the weak areas of our work, and brings out the strengths so that everyone on the team can see it.
Traditional science is a good example where precise questioning occurs. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn discovered that asking really good questions is actually very difficult. He noted that there are times when we begin to believe the established information so readily that we no longer question the underlying “facts”. Good questioning can sometimes overturn those known facts. Astronomer Copernicus, for example, asked in 1543, “Could it be that the Earth orbits the sun?”
Asking the right question is something that takes practice and the right work environment. Leaders that know how to do this are much more likely to be truly great leaders. Sometimes we call it by the idiom “cut to the chase” or, simply, get to the point. Leaders do this time and again … and they do it well.
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[1] http://www.techfresh.net/motorola-dynatac-8000x-worlds-first-mobile-phone/
[2] http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventorsalphabet/a/martin_cooper.htm