Better Decisions Start With Better Questions
I sat across from a CEO who had made up his mind about something.
You cannot be a great CEO and have a great life. Pick one.
He wasn't being dramatic. He had evidence. He had trusted a COO completely, taken his eye off the ball, and watched that person blow everything up. The business he had spent years building came apart in a way that cost him enormously — financially, emotionally, professionally.
So he drew a conclusion that felt like wisdom but was actually a wound:
The only way to protect what you've built is to never let go of it.
He was buried in his work. Four kids at home. A wife. A life happening without him while he white-knuckled every decision, every process, every detail. Not because he didn't want to be present. Because he was terrified of what happened the last time he wasn't.
I didn't argue with him.
I asked him a question.
If nothing changes — if you keep leading exactly the way you're leading right now — what does your life look like in ten years?
He got quiet.
Not the polite quiet of someone formulating a response. The real quiet. The kind that happens when a question finds the place you've been carefully not looking.
He started talking about his kids. How old they'd be. What he'd have missed. He talked about his marriage. About the version of himself that would exist after a decade more of this pace. About whether the business would even be sustainable if everything still ran through him and only him.
The question didn't give him an answer.
It gave him a picture he couldn't unsee.
Then I asked the second one.
If you could change that — if you could build something that didn't require you to sacrifice your life to protect it — what would that make possible that isn't available to you now?
That one cracked something open.
Because he had never let himself imagine it. He had closed the door on that version of his life so completely, so deliberately, that the question felt almost disorienting. Like being asked to describe a color you'd decided didn't exist.
But he answered it. Slowly at first. Then with something that looked a lot like longing.
Here's what I've learned after years of sitting with leaders:
Most people are not suffering from a lack of information.
They're suffering from a lack of the right question.
The information is usually there. The intelligence is there. The capability is there. What's missing is the interruption — the question that cuts through the story they've been telling themselves and creates just enough space for something true to surface.
Answers close conversations. They move things forward, yes — but they also shut the door on everything that wasn't considered.
Questions open things. They slow the assumption down long enough to examine it. They surface what's been invisible. They create the conditions for a different kind of thinking.
And sometimes a different kind of thinking is the only thing standing between a leader and a completely different life.
That CEO is still leading his company.
He's also coaching his kids' sports teams. Present in his marriage. Building a leadership team he actually trusts — not because he's naive, but because he did the harder work of learning what trust requires of him as a leader.
He didn't find that by working harder or knowing more.
He found it because someone asked him a question he couldn't answer quickly.
The questions I come back to again and again — in Vistage rooms, in coaching conversations, in my own life when I'm stuck:
If nothing changes, what does this look like in three years? Ten? Twenty?
If you could change that one thing, what would it make possible that isn't available to you now?
They're not complicated questions.
But in the right moment, with the right person, they have a way of changing everything.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She asks the questions others are too busy to slow down for.