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The True Cost of Asking 'Stupid Questions'

Imagine this. You need one tiny detail buried deep in a 20-page internal policy. Or maybe a product decision made months ago, referenced once in a Slack thread… somewhere. You know someone probably has the answer - maybe even documented it - but you’re not sure where to look. 

So, do you ask? Or do you spend 20 minutes searching, scanning, second-guessing?

It’s a dilemma you’ve probably faced a hundred times - and each time, you tell yourself it’s easier to figure it out than to risk asking something “stupid.” But what if that hesitation is costing your organization more than you realize?


Why asking isn’t equal

There’s a big difference in how asking questions plays out depending on who’s doing the asking.

If you’re a manager, asking a question feels… easy. You fire off a message. People respond. Fast. Your time is seen as expensive - your request gets priority. No one questions whether your ask is valid. Even if it’s simple. Even if it's been answered before.

Now imagine you're not in a leadership role. Your time, by comparison, is “cheap.” You pause before asking. You weigh the risk of seeming uninformed. You wonder if your question is annoying or obvious. Worse, you worry you’re adding noise to someone else’s day - especially if that someone is already drowning in messages. So you don’t ask. Or you wait too long to ask. Or you ask five people in three channels and hope someone responds. This isn’t about confidence - it’s about perceived friction and fear of being a burden.


Silence is expensive

According to McKinsey, the average interaction worker spends nearly 20% of their time looking for internal information or tracking down the right colleague. Let that sink in. That’s one day per week spent searching instead of executing. And that’s just the visible part. Now add the cost of:

  • Repetitive questions that drain SMEs.
  • Redundant work from guessing wrong.
  • Lost momentum while waiting for an answer.

In many cases, hesitation is well-intended. People don’t want to disturb someone else’s flow. But the result is the same: wasted time, avoidable frustration, and silent inefficiency. And the worst part? From a manager’s perspective, everything looks fine. Because no one reports “I wasted two hours today trying not to bother someone.”


The OG effect

Then there are the OGs. The people who’ve been around long enough to know not just the answers - but the people with the answers. They don’t hesitate to ask. They don’t worry about bothering anyone. They’ve built the social capital that lets them operate efficiently. Their secret isn’t just knowledge. It’s relationships. And that makes them incredibly effective. But it’s also why their performance is so hard to replicate. Most team members don’t have their network or confidence - especially in fast-scaling or remote environments where people barely know who does what.


Now, imagine this…

What if every employee had their own personal OG? One that never judged, never rolled its eyes, and never forgot an answer.  A judgment-free space where asking a “stupid” question didn’t feel risky.

A system that:

  • Answered instantly - if the knowledge already exists
  • Routed the question to the right SME - without the Slack spam
  • Saved the answer - so no one has to answer again

No hesitation. No bottlenecks. No wasted hours.


Conclusion

Most companies don’t have a knowledge problem. They have an asking problem. If your team hesitates to ask, that silence is costing you. NextKS makes it easy to ask, easy to answer, and impossible to lose the knowledge that matters.

If that sounds like something your team could use - well, now you know where to ask.

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