On Questioning

Or, how I end up down a rabbbit hole.

As may be apparent by now if you’ve been reading my stuff for a bit, questions are a driving factor of sorts for me. 

• What’s new in digital advertising?

• How’s the economy looking?

• Who got hacked today?

• Do I need to update something?

• What are people doing these days?

• Where are they spending time?

• Why Do We Have Phillips Head Screws?

• Is Zuck actually a robot?

• What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

• How does that work?

• What would happen if Google suddenly shut down?

• What’s a better name for “AI”?

At Blue Ion, the Discovery process with new clients / projects revolves around questions. We send over a questionnaire and use the answers to inform what comes next. And then keep asking questions until they are likely tired of giving us answers. 

I’ve gotten in the habit of telling clients I’d rather ask the stupid question early than assume the answer until it’s too late. 

The thing is, I wasn’t always like this. 

Sure, I had the smart ass version of answering questions down. And I think I’ve always been fairly curious. But I don’t remember asking lots of questions in school. (I do remember plenty of instances where I felt the question answerer wasn’t actually answering the question the asker asked.) And I for sure remember saying, in at least one job interview, that my weakness was not asking enough questions. (Pretty sure I said that in one of my interviews with Blue Ion, and now here we are.) 

I don’t know what the tipping point was. Or if having real live humans around to answer my questions instead of Googling (that’s more of a “how did I get into marketing?” story, if you want to hear it) got me in the habit. Or if reading and internalizing Seth Godin blog posts since roughly 2010 is to blame (when did I discover Seth?). But I remember a question being posed to a group back in my economic development days that still acts as a guidepost for me when marrying my curiosity for random facts and desire to help people do their business and marketing better (yeah, I’m weird, you should really know that by now). It was:

What’s your ocean?

That’s going to be its own post someday, no spoilers. But it’s lead to me asking questions like:

• What’s your spoon?

• What’s your F-150?

• What’s your Bronco?

• What’s the future of search?

• What are we talking about when we talk about “retail sales”?

• Who’s left holding the bag?

• Are beans the og battery?

I’ve even started compiling a list of questions I like. 

So, what questions have you been asking lately?

Here’s a question to end on, what happens if you give Stable Diffusion emoji as a prompt?