“It’s the question- not the answer -the true magnetic north for people’s lives”

ProXXIma
4 de junho de 2017 - 19h44

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” 

Friedrich Nietzsche

The number of writings, postings and publishings trying to answer to all kind of problems or challenges are big figures nowadays. There are all sorts of tips, success recipes, opinions, personal experiences, clever ways of achieving fame, making money, disrupting markets, bring back the lost love, etc. Answers are given, sold and traded like a panacea or trivial merchandise on a street fair.

The reality is that the world is full of answers like never before in human history and the Big Data pot is like an oracle of growing information where you can dig in anything about everything now. Computerworld publication estimates that the data volume available by 2020 will reach dozens of thousands of petabytes daily. To have an idea about what a petabyte is, just bear in mind that all the 10 billion pictures on Facebook posted until the end of 2015 represents 1,5 petabyte and 50 petabytes contains everything that the human kind has written in all history in all languages.

So, at this stage of our Information Era and Communication Society we have reached a tipping point: the world is flooded with info and answers. What we need now is to find the questions. “Do you really need to know what you think you need to know? Why? Is it relevant? Is it the right question? Can you change the question and change your destination or your destiny with it?” It’s the question- not the answer -the true magnetic north for people’s lives and companies trail to success as the question we throw ahead can point to where and how far we’ll get.

But let’s be clear: the kind of questioning I’m talking about has nothing to do with unawareness. On the contrary, the question that matters must be made of great deals of knowledge. It doesn’t simply ask; it disrupts and proposes at the same time and just so it can be a constructive tool. It must be honest, independent, daring, pushy, ambitious, angular, razor sharp, insightful and so sure of what it searches or interrogates that it seems to bring the seed of the answer in its own womb (and the best ones do it, actually).

Knowing how to find the Big Questions, as I call them, is the real strategic challenge now. Once found, using a Big Question is a bit like fishing and the better the BQ is, the greater is the possibility of reaching deeper in the sea of answers and get the hidden big fishes out of all that mass of cold data and info cliché.

So, instead of looking for answers, it would be better working on how to make BQ a process really insightful, solid in its interrogative core and a main element in any modern entrepreneurial venture or business activity. In this regard, I can say that Business Intelligence (B.I.), Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.-applied to processes in the way Google is doing with advertising, for instance) and Creativity above all are key elements to the process of shaping Big Questions.

Answers are commodity now. Everybody has one and it’s usually the same. It’s the question we make that can make a difference.

Alexandre Gama

(This article is a prequel to the “15 answers with a question mark” article posted on March)