The art of generating your own questions in a complex world

The Tyranny of Quick Answers

We live in a world of constant urgency. In business, everything must move fast: strategic plans, reorganizations, innovation, digitalization. For every problem, an immediate answer is expected. But there is a trap: too often, companies focus on answering other people’s questions - those posed by competitors, by the market, by the media, by consultants. In doing so, they lose their most precious ability: to create their own questions.

Asking Your Own Questions: A Strategic Act

A company is not doomed to live within the framework imposed by its environment. It can choose to open new horizons by daring to generate entirely new questions.

• What if our customers expect something different from what we believe?

• What if our value is measured not only in revenue but in overall impact?

• What if we invented a business model more resilient to complexity?

These questions are not escapes from reality. On the contrary, they are a way to face it directly, with courage and clarity.

Complexity as a Playground

The temptation is strong to simplify complexity, to reduce it to processes and KPIs. But complexity is not a problem to be solved: it is the living world’s playground, the place where innovation and resilience emerge.

A company that dares to embrace complexity instead of avoiding it becomes more agile, more creative, more robust.

My Experience: Answers… and Questions

At Decathlon, when we launched the Innovation platform, the famous “2-second” tent was not an answer to a market question. It was a new question: “What if setting up a tent could be as simple as snapping your fingers?”

At Somfy, digital transformation (SmartHome) was not only driven by the desire to respond to technological trends. It came from another question: “What if a home could become intuitive, connected, capable of learning from its inhabitants?”

Each time, true value arose from a question that did not yet exist.

A Managerial Posture to Reinvent

In a world where answers all look alike, difference comes from the quality of the questions asked.

• The role of the leader is not to have all the answers.

• The role of the leader is to create the space where the right questions emerge.

• And to engage the team to explore those questions with boldness.

This requires a new posture: listening, welcoming uncertainty, accepting not to know right away. It is a demanding posture, but it is the only one that unleashes energy.

Reinventing Value Creation

Asking new questions also means rethinking what value is. Value is not limited to immediate profit: it includes resilience, human impact, and the ability to contribute to a sustainable world.

The companies that will survive and thrive tomorrow will be those that have the courage to ask these questions, and answer them with truly meaningful models.

So, next time you are tempted to look for a quick answer, stop for a moment. Ask yourself:

Is this really our question? Or are we answering someone else’s?

Transformation does not begin with answers, it begins with questions. Yours. The ones that belong to you, that define you, and that will give you the power to invent the future.