The Most Expensive Silence in Business

Everyone agreed, nobody asked...

The most expensive silences in business happen in boardrooms.

Picture the scene - I've sat in versions of it on three continents. The strategy paper has been circulated. It is thorough, confident, and forty pages long. The executive team presents with polish. Around the table, experienced heads nod. Someone asks about the timeline. Someone else asks about the numbers on page thirty-one. And the one question that actually matters - the simple, almost childish question about whether the whole premise still holds - goes unasked. Not because nobody thought of it. Because everybody assumed someone else knew the answer, and nobody wanted to be the person who didn't.

Eighteen months later, that question gets asked at length. Usually by lawyers.

I've been thinking about this since I interviewed Fredrik Haren - The Creativity Explorer - for The Power Within podcast. Fredrik has spent twenty-five years studying creativity in more than seventy-five countries, and his conclusion cuts against everything our corporate cultures reward. We promote experts. We defer to experts. But an expert, by definition, is someone who already knows and people who already know stop asking. An explorer knows nothing. An explorer only has questions. And it is the questions, not the answers, that move organisations forward.

Fredrik puts the root of it in four words: "Curiosity comes from care. What you care about, you get curious about." Which means the reverse is also true, and it should worry every chief executive reading this: when the questions stop coming from your managers, it isn't laziness you're seeing. It's the early sign that they've stopped caring or stopped believing that questions are welcome.

Consider what curiosity is actually worth at each level of an organisation.

For managers, curiosity is the difference between managing work and leading people. The manager who asks "how are you approaching this?" before "is it done?" learns how their people think and people who feel genuinely inquired about perform differently from people who feel monitored.

Every coaching skill I teach ultimately reduces to disciplined curiosity: ask, then actually listen.

For leaders, curiosity is strategy insurance. Fredrik tells a story about Frank Stephenson, the designer behind some of McLaren's greatest cars, who noticed a mounted sailfish behind a hotel reception desk and couldn't let the question go "Why is this the fastest fish in the ocean?" The obsession ended in a wind tunnel, and the findings shaped how McLaren designed cars. The insight didn't come from the motor industry. It never does. Leaders who are only curious about their own sector are borrowing tomorrow's blind spots at compound interest.

But it is at board level that curiosity stops being a nice-to-have and becomes, in my view, a fiduciary muscle. Think about what a non-executive director actually has. Not the management information - that arrives curated. Not time - a handful of days a year. Not proximity to the business. Strip it all away and a board member has exactly one tool of consequence: the question. A board that has stopped being curious hasn't just gone stale; it has quietly stopped governing. The groupthink that follows is the subject of a sharp piece in the IoD's Director magazine this summer; is rarely a failure of intelligence around the table. It is a curiosity deficit. Scrutiny without curiosity is compliance theatre: the questions get asked because the governance code says they must, not because anyone is still genuinely wondering.

And here is the uncomfortable part, the bit I see in almost every senior leader I coach. Curiosity declines with seniority - not because senior people are less capable of it, but because it gets more expensive. The higher you rise, the more you are paid to know. Asking the naive question starts to feel like a withdrawal from your credibility account. So the most experienced person in the room asks the fewest real questions, precisely when their questions would be worth the most. It takes a particular kind of inner security to say, in front of people who report to you, "I don't understand this - take me through it slowly." That security is built, not born. It is inner work, which is exactly why curiosity belongs in any honest conversation about leadership, and why it runs through so many of the interviews behind my forthcoming book.

So a practice, whichever seat you occupy. Before your next significant meeting, decide on the one question you are slightly embarrassed to ask - the one that feels too basic. Then ask it first. In years of coaching senior leaders, I have watched that single habit change careers, and I have never once seen it damage one. The room is almost always relieved. Half of them had the same question.

The expensive silence only needs one person to break it. It may as well be you.