Have you noticed how an innocent question can upset someone’s equilibrium? Ask someone ‘why’ and you’ll often see them become very defensive. Do they fear change or do they see it as a primeval ‘attack’; the person asking the question is probing your defences and cast iron beliefs?

The trouble is, it’s only by questioning our assumptions and beliefs that we can make progress, both as a society and individually. Taiichi Ohno at Toyota introduced the idea of asking ‘why’ five times to get to the root of a problem; to understand what’s really going on.

In Turkey a few years ago, where I was involved in the ‘coalition’ efforts to quell the strife in Syria, I was talking to a British army officer over lunch. The way the campaign was being waged was, to my mind, a little nonsensical. We were throwing millions of pounds worth of bombs at chaps in black hats, attempting and failing to train a whole new ‘clean’ army and trying to persuade the locals to rise up and throw off their hated oppressors. They were all sort of good ideas on paper but our execution appeared to be flawed. It didn’t help that the US military, the dominant partners in the operation, were, apparently to a man, Republican and were acting like recalcitrant schoolboys under Obama’s presidency asking for permission every time they wanted to wipe their noses.

As we chewed through yet another chicken steak thing I asked him why we were doing what we were doing. I’d caught him off guard and initially he went with the conversation. “Good point” he said. We discussed the ‘first level’ of thinking: the sort of tabloid headline of the task and how we were patently failing dismally at that. We even started to probe the second layer. It was at the third layer of ‘why’ that he broke.

“Because, that’s how we do it,” he said. “Jace, you’re always asking ‘why’,” he continued in some frustration.

It was telling. No wonder the factory setting for most militaries, bogged down in someone else’s civil war, is to keep doing the same thing and just add more armour protection until they’re so overloaded they’re unable to move.

Questioning someone else’s beliefs and actions is often seen, by their inner chimp, as a direct assault on their very person. Quite often people will become very defensive and try and protect their position.

This often catches me by surprise. My factory setting, as you will be aware if you’ve read a few of these blogs, is to help. There’s no malice or threat in my questions, just a desire to help someone tweak their thought processes to make their lives happier. It’s not some god given insight, it’s just easier to see more effective ways of doing things if you take a step back and view the whole picture.

I wonder if it comes from my background as an athlete. I was talking to an athletics friend of mine only yesterday. Several years ago she had seen me attempting to relive the glory days of my track career. After I’d stumbled around 400m and jumped 10 hurdles (well actually jumped nine and clattered the tenth) she mentioned that I looked really tense in the shoulders. It wasn’t a criticism: I took her observations on board and started to think about how I could overcome that particular flaw. It’s how athletes operate all the time. They run; their coach or colleague mentions what they’ve noticed; and the athlete probes their own memories and feelings to make the appropriate changes. Athletics is simple: you’re trying to run, jump or throw as fast, far or high as possible. The sport is about constant improvement. Notice how Usain Bolt, even during post-race interviews would analyze the race to see where he could make improvements.

In normal life, though, people treat questions as a threat. The inner chimp wants to stay put and, as it gets the first vote, tries to defend its current position.

Notice how when children ask questions we defer to our inner chimp. Nearly all parents reach a breaking point when their offspring are asking ‘why’. As parents we feel we ought to ‘know’ all the answers. When a child’s incessant ‘why’ reaches the edge of our ‘knowledge’ we have two options: take them by the metaphorical hand and walk with them as we make knew discoveries together, or defer to our inner chimp, and exert our ‘bigger and cleverer chimp’ ‘authority’. Kill the conversation. “Because it is”, “You’re always asking why”, etc.

We’re born to explore. It’s such a shame that we beat that out of children when they’re so young. I’m quite lucky, I’ve always been a bit of a thicky so I’ve had to press on asking questions. I’ve been quite surprised how many people genuinely don’t ‘know’ the answer. It started with my asking what certain abbreviations actually meant. People were throwing them around with gay abandon so I rather assumed they knew what they stood for. I have my own thoughts on corporate abbreviations which will probably appear in a future blog.

I’m now an instructor. I ‘know’ I don’t know everything. In fact, most of what I know is out of date, or a model that no longer has any function. Whenever I’m asked a question now I take it as an opportunity to find out some more stuff myself. When the children ask what a word means I’ll get the dictionary out and we’ll look for the answer together.

I’d love the world to be more willing to follow questions rather than attempt to kill the conversation. Next time you’re asked a question pause before your chimp gets all defensive and let your wonderful inquiring mind help you find out something new. Be like the athletes always looking for improvement.

I hope you’ve found this interesting. If you’d like to make changes in your life visit the Inflow Performance website. I look forward to hearing from you. If you’re brave enough to examine your own beliefs and assumptions then I can probably help you move forward.

As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts.