“The Question We Do Not Know to Ask…”

What if we don’t have the answers because we never learned to ask the right questions? Or maybe it is not even about learning. Maybe we are facing something so unknown that we don’t yet know what to ask.

There are moments when we face the unknown we simply don’t know what to ask. Not out of ignorance but because the space is too vast, too unfamiliar, too new. So it is not always about skill. Sometimes it is about openness, presence, a kind of humility before the unknown.

Someone recently said this at an investment panel: “What questions do we not know to ask? Once you know the question, the answer becomes the easy part.”

That line didn’t just resonate. It described something I have lived with for as long as I can remember.

As a child, I asked questions that confused people. Teachers frowned. Classmates laughed. Adults and later colleagues dismissed me: “Stay on topic! That’s not what we are talking about.” But for me, it was. I wasn’t looking for answers, I was trying to find the real question, a question that didn’t yet exist.

Often the only questions we tolerate are the ones designed to confirm what we already know. We don’t ask to explore, we ask to arrive. But when no one has the answer, maybe it is not a matter of complexity, maybe it is a matter of blindness.

Einstein once said, “The important thing is not to stop questioning; curiosity has its own reason for existing.” And yet, true curiosity is rare.

How often do we ask not from wonder, but from control? We want the answer, we want to be right, we want certainty.

Yet authentic curiosity doesn’t begin with a need to solve. It begins with the courage to not know, and it comes with active listening, too.

In philosophy of mind, Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers explore the “hard questions.” Not just how things work, but what it is like, what it means to be. The mystery of consciousness isn’t that it lacks answers. Maybe it is that our frameworks, our ways of thinking are too small to hold the question fully.

In leadership, I see similararities. Many leaders are celebrated for having fast, confident, persuasive answers. But the leaders who grow others, who shift cultures, are often the ones who pause, who ask the question no one else dares to ask, who hold space for not knowing.

And that is what I try to bring into coaching. Not just new answers, but better questions. Not answers that perform, but questions that provoke. Because real leadership isn’t about controlling the answer; it’s about creating the conditions where better questions can live.

So today, I stay loyal to that part of me, the one who never stopped asking, wondering, exploring.

Because sometimes, the deeper truth is not something we discover. It is something that becomes visible only when the right question finally appears.

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