The Thomas Question is the name given by three unrelated people in three different contexts for a skill I have developed over the years. That skill is the ability to ask questions which, while kind, penetrate to the core of an issue. In the words of one of those individuals who helped coin the term:
In team discussions and meetings with the upper management, it was fairly common that Thomas would politely interject with the football “time out” hand motion, and state, “I have a question.” That statement would typically cause a silence to fall over the group. Then he’d ask a question that, not uncommonly, caused some guarded nervous laughter. Nervous because the question had just cut to core of the issue under discussion and the clarity of that issue had just become exposed.-1-
I first heard the expression “Thomas Question” in a design team meeting while in graduate school. We–the design team–were meeting in a tight meeting room the the back of a coffee shop in Seattle, and I recall asking a question after several minutes of discussion. I don’t actually recall what the discussion was about, or what my question was, but I clearly remember the reaction of the group when I piped up with “I have a question.”
In the next couple of seconds while I was formulating my question, the room became very quiet, all eyes turned to me, and there was some nervous laughter. When I heard the laughter, I interrupted my own question with: “OK, before I ask my real question, I need to understand what just happened. When I said I had a question, I heard a couple people laugh. Does this indicate that I tend to ask stupid questions?”
There were several looks around the room as if everyone was looking for someone who would break the bad news to me. Finally someone said, “No, were not laughing because anything you say is going to be stupid or even funny. It’s just well, we all know you are about to ask us a ‘Thomas Question’.”
That took me by surprise, and when I asked exactly what a “Thomas Question” was, feeling very self conscious, the answer was:
“Well, we know it’s going to be provocative, and it’s going to be a hard question to answer because it cuts to the core of the issue. And that always, well, makes us kind of nervous. We laugh not because you are about to ask something funny, but rather because it’s going to put us on the spot, in a good way, but in a way that exposes us, and that can make us nervous.”
The same term, “Thomas Question,” has come up in at least two other completely unrelated contexts, one while working in Hewlett-Packard Company, and again when I was working with school districts.
So, what exactly is a Thomas Question?
It is a question founded on observation, and a question that seeks causation. It is almost always a question which begins with an observation, something like, “here’s what I’m observing,” and finishes with a justifying question, something like “I’m wondering why…?” It may seem contrarian, though that is not really the intention. Rather it is founded in an unwillingness to accept common wisdom.
Where did these Thomas Questions come from?
I don’t know where the Thomas Question originated, though I some theories.
I was the kid who would hide out in the basement and take things apart to try to understand how they worked. In high school I started studying electronics because when I took radios or TVs apart, there were just wires and little black boxes (or to date myself, little glowing tubes).
This tendency to seek understanding of what was not immediately visible was reinforced in Navy Nuclear Power training. It was at the core of the engineering courses I took in college, and often how I developed rapport with professors. I once took a course in computer architecture, not because I was a computer science student at the time, but because I owned a computer, and wanted to understand how it worked.
I recall the first calculation I ever had to officially check as an engineer. It was a radiation exposure calculation which had been performed by the senior health physicist at the nuclear plant I had just hired on to. And here I was, fresh out of college, and I questioned the assumptions made by this licensed engineer with 20 years of experience. It turned out he was right, but it took him four hours of research to justify that assumption, he gave me credit for questioning that assumption.
This interest in how thing worked took on a social dimension in the commercial nuclear power industry. It was no longer enough to accept that a piece of equipment failed, root cause analysis required asking why it failed. The why it failed almost always resulted from human error. But root cause didn’t stop there, because there was an acknowledgement that humans always make mistakes, you had to go deeper, to understand how the system had failed, what part of the process allowed a mistake to go unfound.
This skill of asking questions, digging until I found the root cause or core factor of success, served me well when supporting manufacturing lines, and later when designing them for Hewlett-Packard. When I deviated from the assumption of “system” as a technology system, of the “manufacturing line,” to a system being the people, processes and technology which had to work together, we were able to achieve great things.
The Thomas Question is the embodiment of that philosophy, exploring the system which underlies what we observe on the surface, to peel apart, layer by layer the underlying causal factors which effect systems. The Thomas Question is one aspect of a continuing learning process, part of what enables The Art of Inquiry.
What is the Icon at the beginning of this article?
The symbol at the beginning of this article is the traditional Chinese symbol wèn, meaning learning, knowledge, or scholarship. It is used here to represent inquiry. Two ears surrounding a mouth; to listen twice as much as one speaks. I use in in any context in which it seem appropriate to capture the questioning intent of a post. This artwork version provided by Lichen Dai.