Image: AI-generated Illustration of The Question Underneath the Noise
When you let silence sit long enough, the questions change. The surface questions, the ones about schedules and output and efficiency, lose their urgency. A deeper one takes their place. I ask it of my mentees regularly. Why are you doing what you are doing? I have asked it dozens of times. Recently, I asked it of myself, and it landed differently.
Michael Every, the Rabobank global strategist, frames a version of this for economies. His question is not “what will GDP be?” but “what is GDP for?” In a more contested, zero-sum world, he argues, economies can no longer separate output from purpose. Grand strategy, as he puts it, is statesmanship: deciding what you want your economy to look like before you measure it.
The last two weeks, I kept things quiet. Limited calls, limited social media, limited interaction. The world did not.
The Iran war commentary had settled into a familiar rhythm. You are either for the strikes or against them. You either believe Western media or you reject it. You either support America or you condemn it. Two weeks of commentary, and most of it was running on the same pattern: choose a side, defend it loudly, treat anyone who asks a structural question as a threat. Everyone in the conversation was working with incomplete information. That was never the problem. The problem was how many people treated incomplete information as sufficient for conclusion.
A voter ID bill reached the US Senate floor. The reaction split along tribal lines before the debate even began. Most African nations require proof of citizenship to vote, as do most countries globally, and broad bipartisan majorities of American voters, across racial groups, support the principle. From an African vantage point, it is strange to watch a policy with near-universal support elsewhere get swallowed by domestic tribalism. The institutional context differs, and those differences matter. But the polarisation made genuine inquiry almost impossible. The question I asked was simple: what are we missing here?
Then CAF stripped Senegal of the AFCON title and handed it to Morocco, two months after Senegal won the final on the pitch. A committee, from a boardroom, overturned a result that the world watched. We talk a great deal on this continent about colonialism, imperialism, and corruption. We do not talk nearly enough about incompetence. The man who chairs CAF is one of the wealthiest people in Africa. That does not make the institution competent. It makes the incompetence harder to name, because naming it carries a cost most people are unwilling to pay. Name it, and the response is defence of the man, not interrogation of the institution. People will cite the governance structure without understanding the governance structure they are citing.
In each of these cases, the question that dominated was how to respond, how to win, how to defend. The question that was missing was the one Every asks of economies.
A thread I read this week laid out the case for the US and Israeli strikes on Iran with confidence and granular detail. Coercive linkage, anticipatory self-defence, customary international law. The analysis was structured, the vocabulary was precise, and the conclusion was predetermined. It was advocacy dressed as analysis. The strategic rationale for the strikes may well exist. But the author warned about Gulf escalation, about IRGC desperation targeting ports and terminals and desalination plants, and never once followed that warning to its downstream. Eastern and southern African nations are heavily dependent on fuel imports routed through the Middle East. Since the war began on 28 February, the Strait of Hormuz has effectively closed. Fuel supply chains in import-dependent African economies are fracturing. African governments are scrambling to find alternative sources and competing against wealthier economies for what remains. “Finish the job” is a phrase that sounds decisive until you ask what finishing it actually means, and who absorbs the cost of finishing it. The answer, as usual, includes people who were never part of the conversation.
This same pattern showed up closer to home. Zambia’s Cabinet approved a move toward a 24-hour economy. The logic is sound. Idle capital at night is a real inefficiency. The Copperbelt mines have run round-the-clock shifts for decades. Extending that principle to retail, transport, and services is a defensible ambition. But the distance between a Cabinet announcement and actual round-the-clock economic activity is an infrastructure problem. At the drought peak, residential areas were receiving as little as three to five hours of power a day. Street lighting is patchy. Public transport winds down after dark. Private security costs eat the marginal profit of staying open at night. The policy is directionally correct. The sequencing runs ahead of the foundations.
The same gap between ambition and infrastructure shows up at every scale.
Output has never been easier to produce. Technology generates it. Social media distributes it. The cycle of production and consumption accelerates without anyone stopping to ask what the production serves. When output was difficult, efficiency was a competitive advantage. Now that output is cheap, efficiency alone answers nothing. The question shifts from how much you can produce to what your production is for. Careers, schedules, and operating models face the same structural test that Every poses to economies.
I had spent months building a detailed daily operating plan. Every block accounted for, from morning spiritual practice through market hours through evening study. Precise to the quarter hour. I was solving for efficiency. What I had not settled, with the same precision, was the question underneath the efficiency.
Precision is not purpose. You can optimise a 24-hour day and still not have answered the question underneath it.
That is what the silence gave me. A reordering. The question underneath the schedule is the same question underneath the economy, the same question underneath the commentary. What is this for.
I carry my own tendencies, chief among them the habit of building structure before settling direction, and absorbing the rhythm of whatever environment I operate inside. The discipline I ask of institutions, of analysts, of my own mentees, I had not always applied with the same consistency to my own operating architecture. That includes the rooms I choose to stay in. The social pressure to remain in virtual groups, out of fear of missing something or need to be included, is its own form of noise. If a conversation does not sharpen your thinking, it is dulling it. There is no neutral position, which means there is no reason to remain.
Both questions matter. The first one, how do I run this, is necessary. The problem is that most people stop there.
The second question does not generate engagement. It is not rewarded by the boardroom or the news cycle. But it is the question that determines whether the architecture is pointed at anything worth building.
This weekend, before the next week fills the silence again, it may be worth sitting with Every’s version of it. What is the output for.