Ask No Evil, Hear No Evil
- Apr 9
- 4 min read
On the evening of January 27, 1986, the night before the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, a phone call took place.
Engineers from Morton Thiokol, the company that manufactured the O-ring seals that would fail the next morning, were trying to stop the launch. They knew. They had calculated. They had warned. They presented data showing the seals were unreliable at low temperatures, and that night was unusually cold. ¹
The NASA managers on the other end of the line did not ask.
They did not ask: "What is the probability of failure?" They did not ask: "Is there a scenario in which we don't launch tomorrow?" They did not ask the question that hung in the air between them.
Seven astronauts died the following morning.
I don't tell this story to indict NASA. I tell it because when I sit across from executives - CEOs, founders, senior leaders - and I ask them: "Is there a question you know you should be asking, and you're not?" — there is almost always a brief silence. And then a nod.
Why Not Asking Feels Safe
In social psychology, we spend a great deal of time studying why people choose not to know. The phenomenon has a name: willful ignorance — and it is far more common than it appears. A meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin found that roughly 40% of people avoid easily obtainable information when acquiring it might obligate them to act. ²
This is the mechanism that was operating in NASA's launch control room: if I ask the engineers whether this is safe, and they tell me it isn't — I have to stop the launch. And if I stop it, the launch is delayed. The President is watching. The press is watching. I have a career.
If I don't ask — I don't know. And if I didn't know — perhaps I'm not responsible.
This is not crude moral negligence. It is a subtle, nearly automatic mechanism that operates quietly inside otherwise healthy organizations — in executive meetings, in one-on-ones, in conversations about products being shipped before they're ready.
The Question That Creates Accountability
We tend to think of asking a question as an act that exposes weakness. A question signals "I don't know," "I'm not certain," "I need to check." In environments that reward confidence and decisiveness (and which tech organization doesn't?) questions can feel like a step backward.
The question doesn't expose weakness. It creates accountability.
The manager who didn't ask the engineers wasn't protecting himself — he was building a trap for himself. A trap in which he couldn't claim ignorance, but couldn't demonstrate knowledge either. He was caught in the gray territory of "I didn't ask."
The manager who had asked — even if the answer had been "we're not certain" — would have made a conscious decision. Perhaps to launch anyway. Perhaps to delay. But a decision. With a name attached to it. With an address.
A question is not a sign of weakness. A question is an act of leadership.
What Leaders Don't Say Out Loud
In my work as an executive coach, I encounter the organizational version of this story almost every week. It doesn't involve a space disaster. It usually looks like this:
A VP of R&D who never asked his team "are we actually going to meet the schedule?" - because he knew that if he asked, the answer would force him to walk into the CEO's office with bad news.
A founder who didn't ask her co-founder "do you still believe in this vision?" - because she was afraid the answer would be no.
A VP of Product who didn't ask the team "are we genuinely ready to ship?" - because everyone had already been working on it for a year, and how could he ask now.
In each of these cases, the question went unasked. Not for lack of talent. Not for lack of experience. But because asking means knowing. And knowing means being responsible. And responsibility, sometimes, feels like too much.
But silence doesn't protect. It only postpones.
Back to Age Four
Four-year-old ask as many as 300 questions a day. Not because they are weak, but because they haven't yet learned to be afraid of the answer. And what happens when they enter school? According to Harvard child psychologist Paul Harris, the number of questions children ask drops sharply, not because curiosity disappears, but because the environment stops rewarding it. ³
A hard question, asked at the right moment, is not an expression of distrust, it is an expression of commitment. Commitment to the truth, to the team, to the outcome. When a leader asks "are we certain enough?", she is not saying "I don't trust you." She is saying "I take what you do seriously. Seriously enough to ask."
In some sense, one of the tasks of mature leadership is to relearn what we knew at age four.
To ask.
Even when it's frightening.
Especially when it's frightening.
I am an executive coach and social psychologist, researching the avoidance of asking questions as part of my doctoral work at Ben-Gurion University. In my work with leaders, executives, and founders, I often find myself dealing with precisely the questions that are hardest to ask - and with what becomes possible when they finally are.
References:
Vu, L., Soraperra, I., Leib, M., van der Weele, J., & Shalvi, S. (2023). Ignorance by Choice: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Underlying Motives of Willful Ignorance and Its Consequences. Psychological Bulletin, 149(9–10), 611–635. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000398
Why do kids ask so many questions — and why do they stop? — Warren Berger
