【英语生活】别问蠢问题

Never be frightened to ask a question: there are no dumb questions.

This was what I was told recently by the head of a company whose board I had just joined as a non-exec director. At the time I found it vaguely reassuring – maybe he didn't expect me to know anything much – and vaguely threatening – maybe he expected me to be bold and incisive.

During the last week I have spent two whole days in back-to-back board meetings and strategy meetings and have concluded that when it comes to the art of inquiry he is wrong. There are lots of dumb questions, and I have managed to ask quite a lot of them. Moreover, I am frightened of asking questions, yet far from being frightened to admit it, I'm quite prepared to flaunt it. This fear is part of the natural order of business life, and there is good reason for it.

None of this means that non-execs should keep quiet. Anyone who needs reminding of what silence can do need only turn to by Tom Bower. If Henry Kissinger or Lord Carrington or the other directors of Black's assorted companies had asked a few questions about the vanishing hundreds of millions, things might have worked out rather differently.

However, I suspect the reason they never put up their hands was not because they were scared of the dumb question. It was because they were ultra-grand, ultra-busy people who had little business experience and less appetite for reading board papers and comforted themselves with the belief that Lord Black was a great guy.

Yet for normal people at work the fear of the question is a big and understandable thing. To speak out in a board meeting – or in front of clients, colleagues or competitors – is to expose oneself. In moderation, that fear serves a purpose: as we are frightened of looking foolish we think twice before opening our mouths and actually being foolish.

Before last week's meeting-a-thon had even got under way I had already failed to ask about some things that were troubling me. On the itinerary were the dread words “casual dress”. The pressing question formed: how does a woman dress casually at a board meeting? Are jeans OK if worn with high heels and smartish shirt? Is it better to err on the side of too smart or too casual?

I did not ask any of the above for fear of looking even more trivial than I looked already. Moreover the company's executives surely had more pressing concerns.

The first defining trait of the classic dumb question is that it comes from not having listened properly. Suppose you have been busy sending surreptitious e-mails on your BlackBerry during a meeting, and then, just so as to look as if you are alert and engaged, you ask your killer question. Unfortunately it has already been answered at length and you end up looking dumb, rude and lazy too.

The dumbness of the question is also related to the position and age of the person who asks it. If a junior person asks something obvious, the question might not be dumb, but the questioner would do better to have spared the yawns of everyone else and asked in private afterwards.

If a senior person asks a dumb question the drill is that everyone pretends not to notice. I once sat next to Prince Philip at a lunch and he asked lots of hair-raisingly dumb questions. One of the advantages of being married to the Queen (or even being the Queen) is that you can ask as many of those as you like.

Ordinary people who pose dumb questions with no fear are less to be commended for their bravery than condemned for their arrogance. In the mid-1980s I went to a talk for journalists at the Bank of England on control of the money markets. One man who had just started working on possibly the most revered financial column in the UK press raised his hand languidly. “What is a bond?” he drawled. The thing that shocked me more than the dumbness of the question was his failure to show any embarrassment at all.

A bigger problem with questions in meetings is not that people ask too few but that they ask too many. And most of these are of the wrong sort and asked for the wrong reasons. These questions are not actually requests for information at all.

The most popular fake-question is not dumb but too-clever-by-half. At press conferences and analysts' meetings people compete to ask the most arcane question possible. Generally they have little interest in the answer. Real attempts to find things out often get asked in private later.

This syndrome is much in evidence when bosses and underlings are in meetings with a third party. Then the underlings open their mouths only to impress the boss.

A friend on the board of a big company tells me of a non-exec who sits through meetings apparently taking notes. What he is actually doing is writing detailed drafts of the superb questions he has up his sleeve. He pays scant attention to what people are saying: his entire focus is on his own performance.

A related variety of non-questions is the I-love-hearing-myself-talk-so-I'm-
going-to-bang-on-interminably question. This is irksome, yet nothing compared with a third variety: the sycophantic question. This generally takes the form of can-you-please-tell-
us-all-how-marvellous-you-are and is sickening to witness.

There is only one sort of dumb fake-question that should be tolerated. It is when someone has given a talk and afterwards asks for questions. There is silence, broken by the odd cough. Then someone puts up a hand and asks something for the sake of it. This is not ego. It is manners

永远别怕提问：问题没有“哑弹”。这是一位公司负责人最近告诉我的，我刚加入他公司的董事会，担任非执行董事。当时，我发现这句话隐约有些令人安慰（也许他并没指望我懂得很多），同时还隐约有点威胁意味（也许他望我大胆尖锐）。

前一阵子，我花了整整两天时间，接二连三地参加多家董事会会议和战略会议，最后得出结论，在质询艺术这一问题上，那位负责人错了。问题“哑弹”有很多，我就问了不少。此外，我还害怕提问，不过毫不害怕承认这点，随时都准备向人炫耀。这种恐惧是商业生活自然规律的一部分，而且是有充分理由的。

这并不意味着非执行董事就该保持沉默。如果要就沉默的作用提醒某人，让他看看汤姆•鲍文(Tom Bower)的作品就可以了。而面对霍林格国际公司(Hollinger International)正在消失的数亿美元，如果亨利•基辛格(Henry Kissinger)、卡林顿勋爵(Lord Carrington)，或布莱克勋爵(Lord Black)旗下各公司的其他董事都问上几个问题，那最后的结果可能会全然不同。

然而，我怀疑，他们之所以从不举手提问，并不是因为他们害怕问题“哑弹”，而是因为他们是一些极为重要、极为忙碌的人物，既没有什么商业经验，也不太爱看董事会文件，同时相信布莱克勋爵是个了不起的人物，以此安慰自己。

然而，对办公室里的普通人来说，害怕问题是一个很重要、也可以理解的现象。在董事会（或在客户、同事或竞争者面前）发言会有暴露自己的危险。如果适度，这种害怕可以让我们达到一个目的：由于怕显得愚蠢，我们会在开口显示确实愚蠢之前再三思量。

在最近一次马拉松式的会议开始之前，我已经因害怕而没能提出一些困扰我的问题了。发给我的日程表中有一些可怕的字眼，比如“随意着装”。一个紧迫的问题出现了：一位女士如何在董事会会议上随意着装呢？牛仔裤配高跟鞋和时髦点的衬衫行吗？走上太时髦或太随意的歧途会更好吗？

我没有提出以上问题，因为怕自己比看起来的样子更琐碎。而且，公司的高管一定还有更紧迫的问题要处理。

经典问题“哑弹”的第一个明确特征是，没听好就提问。假设你在会议期间一直忙着在自己的黑莓(BlackBerry)上偷偷摸摸发电子邮件，然后，为了表现得很活跃和认真，你提出了自认为绝妙的问题。不幸的是，这个问题已经得到了详细的回答，结果你将表现得愚蠢、粗鲁又懒散。

问题引发的沉默也与提问者的地位和年龄有关。如果一个职位较低者问了显而易见的问题，也许不会无人作答，但是，如果想避免别人打呵欠不耐烦、要求会后私下解决的话，问题就最好提得高明点儿。

如果一个地位较高的人抛出了问题“哑弹”，通常大家都会装作没注意到。有一次午餐会，我坐在菲利普亲王(Prince Philip)旁边，他抛出了许多令人毛骨悚然的问题“哑弹”。与女王结婚（连当女王也算上）的好处之一，就是你可以随心所欲地问那些问题。

若普通人无所畏惧地抛出问题“哑弹”，他们很少会因为勇敢得到称赞，更多是要为自己的自大遭到谴责。20世纪80年代中期，我去英国央行(Bank of England)参加一个有关控制货币市场的记者座谈会。一个刚开始为一家财经专栏工作的人无力地举起手，懒洋洋地问道：“什么是债券？” 要知道，他所在的这个专栏可能是英国报业最受尊敬的财经专栏。比这个问题引发的沉默更让我震惊的是，他根本没表现出任何窘态。

会议问题的一个更大问题不是人们问得太少，而是问得太多。而且大多数问题属于错误的类型，又因错误的原因而提出。这些问题实际上不是为了要得到信息而提出的。

最常见的“伪问题”不是导致沉默，而是聪明过了头。在新闻发布会和分析师会议上，人们尽可能争相提出最不可思议的问题。总的来说，他们对答案并没有多少兴趣。真正要发现真相的问题都是随后在私下里问的。

在老板和下属进行有第三方参加的会议上，这种“综合症”非常明显。这种情况下，下属开口就是为了给老板留下印象。

一个在某家大公司董事会任职的朋友告诉我，一位非执行董事在会议上从头坐到尾，一看就是在记笔记。实际上，他所做的是详细草拟秘密备用的超级问题。他不怎么注意人们的发言：他的全部关注点都在自己的表现上。

另一种和这类似的“不成问题的问题”，就是那种“我喜欢听自己讲话，所以要没完没了地抛出好问题”。这种问题固然令人讨厌，然而，论及受讨厌程度，什么也比不上第三种问题：阿谀奉承的问题。通常，这种问题的形式是“你能告诉我们你有多么了不起吗”，看到这种场面真让人作呕。

只有一种应该被容忍的虚假问题“哑弹”。那就是有人讲完话后请大家提问，但会场一片沉默，时而传出几声咳嗽。接着，有人举手，为了改变这种情况而问一些问题。这不是自我表现，而是一种礼貌。

译者/徐柳

《FT商学院》