The “Thomas Question” is a term others have given for something I apparently have a propensity to do, namely ask questions which while kind, tend to probe into layers that sometimes make people feel uncomfortable.

Since I probably reference the Thomas Question, in other areas of this blog, I figure I should probably give some context and examples.

First Use

To be clear, I didn’t invent the term. The first time I heard it used was in a Seattle coffee shop several years ago. I was in a design team meeting and had just interrupted with the American Football “Time Out” hand signal, then began with “Hang on a second, 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, we’re 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 one of your ‘Thomas Questions.’”

That took me by surprise, and when I asked exactly what a ‘Thomas Question’ was, expecting it to be something along the lines of ‘a stupid question,’ 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 it’s going to put us on the spot, in a good way, but in a way that causes nervous laughter.”

The term arose in at least three other independent venues, one in my work at Hewlett-Packard Company, again on a curriculum adoption committee for a local school district, and a third in the cohort of my graduate program.

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 that begins with an observation, something like, “here’s what I’m observing,” and finishes with a justifying question, something like “I’m wondering why…?”

In Hewlett-Packard I first heard the reference after I intervened when a co-worker stomped out of a meeting. When he came back in 10 minutes later, and the meeting facilitator continued as if nothing happened, I gave the time-out signal, and said, “Hang on. Before we move on I think we have an issue that needs to be addressed. I observed my colleague here stomp out of the room a few minutes ago, in what looked like anger. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but if I’m not, I’m confused because I was unaware of anything that would have caused that anger. Before we move on, I think we need to explore what happened.”

A Thomas Question may be something as simple as clarifying the meaning of a three letter acronym (TLA) in a meeting when everyone else is trying to avoid looking stupid.

It may involve calling out an apparent logical flaw in the position of someone in authority. I tend not to be intimidated by authority, and a key aspect of a Thomas Question is that I try to be respectful, while still not shying away from challenging authority. In my undergraduate economics class, the instructor, a PhD candidate, was answering the question of another student by drawing a graph on the chalk board. I became confused so asked her if, for sake of clarity, she could please label the axis of her graph. She couldn’t.

Thomas Questions may seem contrarian, as in the case of the economics instructor, though that is not really the my intention. Rather it is founded in an unwillingness to accept common wisdom on face value.

Where did these Thomas Questions come from?

I credit two key aspects of my past to Thomas Questions, the first is the natural inquisitiveness I had as a kid. I was always taking things apart to figure out how they work.

I remember running an experiment when I was maybe ten years old. You put a couple of wooden matches in a test tube, put a stopper in it, and use a magnifying glass to focus to sun on the ends of the matches to ignite them.

I had expected to see the matches light, then maybe the stopper to pop off and land a couple of inches away. There I am, focusing my little spot of sunlight on the end of math, and then suddenly the tube jumps, the stopper is gone, and all that remained in the tube was a bit of white smoke. I never found the stopper. I subsequently spent many, many hours exploring combustion, then experimenting with glow plug engines, then lawn mower engines, then car engines. Later I would do the same with electronics, then computers and one day I would begin to wonder why people behave the way they do.

The second key contributor to the Thomas Question was the Navy Nuclear Power program. That program was built on Murphy’s laws, essentially the assumption that if anything can go wrong, it will, and it will go wrong in the worst possible way. (Something BP Oil should have considered.) Thus, in nuclear qualification, it was never enough to know what you were supposed to do, you had to know why. (This inquisitiveness didn’t fit so well with the Navy in general, but that’s another story for another post.)

During practice drills, scenarios were often simulated, for example simulated fires or simulated radioactive spills. Because it was simulated, we could essentially “stop time” and ask the drill monitor what we were supposed to be seeing.

Thus began the habit of asking, what am I seeing? Are you seeing it also? It has lots of application, in the nuclear business, in engineering in management, and with my kids.

So what exactly is a Thomas Question?

Since I didn’t create the label, I am often not consciously aware when I am engaged in using these kinds of questions until someone points it out to me. However on reflection, when it is pointed out that I have asked a Thomas Question, I think they share some of the following characteristics

• It is a question which is typically built on an observation. A Thomas Question frequently begins with, “What I’m observing is…”
• It is a question which validates the observation. “Is there anyone else in the room who is seeing the same thing?”
• It is a question which seeks to expose one or more causal factors, which asks the question, why?
• It is an I question. “I’m not following,” or “I’m wondering,” as opposed to “you are not being clear, or “you don’t seem to understand.”
• It is a kind question. It almost always comes with a proposed answer if an answer is not forthcoming.

The Thomas Question is, I think, essentially the result of my desire to understand how and why things work, and my distrust of anything that requires accepting something on faith. What’s that old saying, “in God we trust, all others use cash?”