Kelly’s Rule of Inquiry

If you ask the top people for their opinions first, you won’t get effective advice from the people below them.

A group of people can be asked to make a decision and will march off in a direction they never would have taken by themselves.

When doctors are preparing to perform brain surgery on your wife, pull the top surgeons and physicians into a breakroom with residents and other medical staff and ask the people on the lowest rungs of the profession for their opinions on the surgery first.

Source: Astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, in 2014 at the annual Visitor Industry Luncheon at the Sioux Falls Convention Center
“I learned you do not want to ask the space shuttle commander, the flight director, the chief engineer or program manager his opinion first. If you do, you don’t get effective advice from the people below them.”

At Los Alamos, visitors Niels Bohr and brother Harald obeyed Kelly’s Rule of Inquiry by running their ideas on the current work by Richard Feynman before asking anyone higher up.

Kelly’s Rule of Inquiry by WhatwasIsaying January 25, 2025