You Might Not Like the Next Question

A friend of mine texted me the other day. He’d just gotten off a call with a project manager at another company, and he was furious.

“There’s so much superficiality out there,” he wrote. “People placed in roles for no reason.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I have a version of that call every week. Different company, different PM, same feeling: how are you in this role? How did you get here? Who put you here, and do they know?

He kept going. “I wonder what kind of satisfaction they get from doing a job they can’t do. Or are they so clueless they don’t even realize it? And if so, what satisfaction do they find in not wanting to know things?”

Good questions. I told him he might not like the ones that follow.

Hold that. We’ll get there.

The obvious story

You know this person. You’ve worked with them. Maybe you’re on a call with them right now.

The project manager who schedules a meeting to discuss what should happen at the next meeting. The technical lead who can’t explain what their system does without reading from a slide someone else made. The consultant who answers every question with “let me get back to you” and never does. The person who tracks project progress with yellow smiley faces in a PowerPoint. Not metrics. Not milestones. Smiley faces. And nobody in the room asks what the smiley face means, because everyone already knows: it means “I don’t know, but it feels okay.”

They’re not malicious. They’re not scheming. They’re just… there. Occupying a chair, drawing a salary, going home.

And you sit across from them, carrying the entire cognitive load of the conversation, and you think: how? How are you comfortable here? How do you sit in a room full of things you don’t understand and feel fine?

It’s not anger, exactly. It’s something closer to disorientation. Like watching someone walk through traffic blindfolded and never get hit.

Where does the blame go?

What’s the first thing you do? Blame the system. Obviously.

Someone hired this person. Someone promoted them. Someone decided they were qualified, or at least decided not to decide they weren’t. So the problem is HR, right? The hiring process? The corporate ladder that rewards tenure over competence? The academy that handed them a degree without teaching them to think?

Feels good, doesn’t it? If the problem is the system, then you’re just an unlucky victim of institutional mediocrity. The competent one trapped in a broken machine. Your frustration is righteous. Your standards are correct. The world is simply failing to meet them.

But when has “blame the system” ever actually fixed anything? And if the system is broken, and you can see it clearly, and you keep participating in it… what does that make you?

No, wait. We’re not there yet. I promised the questions would get worse. Let’s get there properly.

What if we’re not even claiming to be good?

Here’s the thing my friend and I share, and maybe you share it too. We don’t think we’re exceptional. We don’t walk around believing we’re the smartest people in the room.

We think we’re the bare minimum.

Read the documentation before the meeting. Understand the system you’re responsible for. If you don’t know something, say so, then go learn it. Is that really a high bar? Isn’t that just… the job?

And then we watch someone operate below that, and they’re fine. Their boss is fine with them. Their company is fine with them. They go home, they sleep, they come back tomorrow and do it again. Nobody is pulling them aside. Nobody is telling them to be more. And they never doubted, not for a minute, that they could be. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. But do we actually know that? Or is that just another thing we decided about them without asking?

So when we get frustrated, is it “I’m better than you”? Or is it something stranger: “I thought this was the ground, and you’re somehow standing below it, and gravity doesn’t seem to apply to you”?

What do you call that? Not arrogance. Something closer to confusion.

What if wanting to be better is the anomaly?

My psychologist said something to me once that I’ve never been able to shake. I was telling him about one of these situations (I have a lot of them, consulting gives you a front-row seat to other people’s organizational dysfunction), and I was doing the thing: the frustration, the bewilderment, the why-don’t-they-want-to-be-better.

He listened. Then he said: “You expect everybody out there to want to evolve. To want to reach the best outcome possible. But that’s not true. Some of them just want to survive. And it’s their right.”

I didn’t like that.

Not because it was wrong. Because it was obviously, uncomfortably right. And because it raised a question I wasn’t ready for: what if the desire to evolve, to push, to know more, isn’t the default? What if that’s the anomaly, and “good enough” is the norm?

The PM my friend was furious about? They’re surviving. Their company hired them, keeps them, pays them. They function in that ecosystem. They might not function in ours, but nobody asked them to. They became “incompetent” the moment they had to interface with someone who defines “doing your job” differently. Before that call, in their own environment, were they even a problem?

So who’s actually out of place? The person who’s comfortable in their role, or the person who’s miserable about it?

Incompetent relative to what?

What does “incompetent” actually mean? Not the feeling of it (we know the feeling). The definition. Incompetent relative to what? To your standard? To theirs? To the company that employs them?

If a PM cannot explain the technical architecture of the project they manage, are they incompetent? You’d say… maybe. Their company, apparently, says no. One of you is wrong. Or are you? What if “project manager” means something fundamentally different in their building than it does in your head?

When you say someone doesn’t understand their role, have you considered that they might understand it differently? That the role, as defined by the organization that created it, doesn’t actually require what you think it requires?

If that’s true, then what are you actually frustrated about? Their incompetence? Or a mismatch between two definitions that were never aligned in the first place?

But wait. You’ve been working in this industry long enough to know what good looks like. You’ve seen the consequences of not knowing: the outages, the budget overruns, the projects that collapse because someone didn’t ask the right question. Your standard isn’t arbitrary. It comes from scars.

So you’re right. You know you’re right.

And they’re comfortable. They know they’re comfortable.

Can both of those things be true at the same time?

The questions you won’t like

Remember what I told my friend? That he might not like the questions that follow?

Here they are.

If the PM is incompetent, then someone incompetent hired them. And someone incompetent manages them. And someone incompetent decided the company’s standards. You can follow that chain as far as you want. It just keeps going.

But at some point the chain has to include you. Because you’re in the room. Maybe you took the contract directly. Maybe you work for a company that took the contract. Maybe you’re two handshakes away from the decision and you still ended up on the call. It doesn’t matter. You’re here. You chose something that led to this, knowing, on some level, what you were walking into.

My friend knows the companies he works with. He’s seen the dysfunction. He keeps showing up. I know the institutional inertia on the other side of my calls. I dial in every week.

If you can see the problem clearly, and you stay… are you really that different from the person who can’t see it and stays? You both made the same choice. You both showed up. At least they’re comfortable.

Who’s paying for your standards?

Your standards are real. They come from experience. By any reasonable measure, they’re correct. But have you ever stopped to ask what they cost you?

You pay them every day. In frustration. In exhaustion. In the cognitive load of noticing everything that’s wrong in a room full of people who don’t notice anything. You pay on every call. You pay in the car on the way home. You pay when you can’t sleep because you’re replaying a conversation with someone who will never replay it.

The person below your floor? Do they pay that tax? They go home. They sleep. They come back tomorrow, perfectly fine, unburdened by the weight of standards nobody asked them to carry.

Your bare minimum is someone else’s ceiling. Their “good enough” lets them sleep while yours keeps you up.

So. Who has the problem?

I told my friend he wouldn’t like the further, necessary, consequent questions.

I was talking about the PM. But I wonder if I knew I was also talking about myself.

Are you sure you’re not doing the same thing right now? Nodding at this essay, thinking about someone specific, someone who doesn’t meet your standard?

What if the most Socratic question isn’t “why don’t they want to know?” What if it’s: why does it bother you so much that they don’t?

And if you’re honest with yourself, truly honest, can you answer that without discovering something about yourself you’d rather not know?

You might not like the next question. But it’s already too late. You’re already asking it.