Question time

Sometimes in life, all you need to do is to ask the right question. Either of yourself or of others. Once the right question is there, you have a reasonable chance of getting the right answer.

In his regular Business Skills articles in Business Spotlight, Bob Dignen has often emphasized the importance of asking quesitons in situations such as meetings or negotiations. For example, questions can be used to clarify what someone has said or to understand their motives better.

I learned an important lesson about asking questions when I was studying at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s. One of my professors, Richard Layard, would often come to the lectures of other members of staff and ask questions that we students were afraid to ask because we thought we might look stupid. Since then, I have (almost) never been afraid of looking stupid.

Another person who wasn't afraid to ask an important question at the London School of Economics was the queen. During a visit in November last year, she was talking to Professor Luis Caricano about the credit crunch. "How come nobody could foresee it?", asked Her Majesty.

Good quesiton, Ma'am. And now a group of economists has written a three-page letter to the queen trying to explain the causes of the current recession and why most experts failed to predict it. You can download the letter here.

As The Observer reported, the letter followed a seminar at the British Academy in June at which many of Britain's top economists were present.

The letter talks of "a faliure of the collective imagination of many bright people". It also says of the causes: "Everyone seemed to be doing their own job properly... And according to standard measures of success, they were often doing it well. The failure was to see how collectively this added up to a series of interconnected imbalances over which no single authority had jurisdiction."

Professor Caricano adds that, "people were doing what they were paid to do, and behaved according to their incentives, but in many cases they were being paid to do the wrong things from society's perspetive."

This is no record of whether the queen was amused by these explanations.