“Black Hole Words” and the power of asking stupid questions
Hi! I’m Molly. I write about what it actually takes to lead inside growing, changing companies: the frameworks that help, the honest truth about what it feels like, and the messy work of shaping a career that actually fits.
Lessons is where those ideas live — both the writing and the conversations around it. (If you want to learn more about how Lessons and the community work, you can read more here.)
First of all let me say, I seem to only take jobs that I feel super unqualified for, and the number one thing it has taught me is that it is actually an extraordinarily powerful skill to ask the “stupid” questions that everyone else is afraid to ask. Stupid questions have the ability to create clarity in places where people didn’t even know there was confusion.
Often times when you’re sitting in a meeting and feeling confused, you think it’s just you. “Obviously I missed something and everyone else knows the answer already, that’s why they’re all nodding...”
NOPE.
Turns out that 80% of the time when you’re confused, everyone else is also confused. And EVERYONE is too scared to stop the meeting and ask the “stupid” question.
“Are we all on the same page about what our goals are?”
“What’s the purpose of this meeting?”
“Do we need to make this decision right now?”
“Did we define that word that we’ve been debating for 20 mins?”
That last one is my favorite. Because it’s like a sneaker wave in business. It seems so obvious — of course everyone knows what that word means — but it turns out that lack of shared definition of words wastes a huge amount of time inside companies.
I have had a lot of jobs in a lot of different parts of the tech world — different types of businesses, different sectors, etc. Each job has caused me to have to go through a ginormous learning curve — to learn the basics of a whole new sector and to ask a LOT of dumb questions. One of the things it has taught me is that each industry has lots of words (and lots of acronyms). When you first start out, you feel stupid for not knowing what the word means, so you look it up after the meeting… It ALWAYS turns out that each word has about 10 definitions and no one agrees on what it actually means. In every industry.
Welcome to “Black Hole Words”.
Having this experience over and over again led me to start talking about Black Hole Words.
