content: how-to-ask-why-without-sounding-like-a-jerk
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| ryan | musings | As technical folks working with non-technical folks sometimes the asks that come through are unclear. In order to get clarity on these we want to ask questions to get clarification on the ask, but it can be challenging to not sound like a jerk when we ask. This can happen even IF we do our best to come across in a positive way. When trying to ask for more details on a project or request I find it's usually best to get to the source of the issue. I like to ask, "What problem are we trying to solve here?" or something similar. This helps to put you and the requester on 'the same team' trying to 'solve the problem' and not in a potentially negative 'why are you asking me this stupid question' sort of light. I can't say that I have 'one weird trick' that will always make this not a problem, but recently at my $dayJob I had an experience that might be helpful in seeing how to navigate this particular process. ## The problem I received an email that went something like this > Please see below. It seems that delivery of paper reports via courrier could > be automated by sending them to a portal. What are your thoughts? My initial thought was, "Yes, if we could automate these reports and send them electronically to a portal that would be more efficient." However, there are some deeper questions here that need to be asked ... like: 1. Why are we sending these reports in the first place? Just asking this question though puts us into a potential state of conflict, i.e. it's similar to sounding like you're asking, "why would you do this stupid thing". In order to avoid this I reframed the question into 3 deeper questions that tried to frame 'the problem' and put me and the requester 'on the same team' to 'solve the problem' 1. What are the reports? 2. What are the recipients of the reports supposed to do with them? 3. Do the recipients of the reports find them helpful, or do they just put them in the shred bin? My first response to the sender was > Ideally any reports that are being delivered on printed paper by courrier > would be better served to be delivered via some electronic means. Can you > tell me, what are these reports and who are the intended recpients? I wanted to explicitly ask who the intended recipients were (I work in Healthcare and these reports are 'for the doctors' but they might actually be getting delivered to an office manager, a front desk person, or anyone other than the doctor). The sender responded back > They are reports that show a key metric for outstanding work left to do for > a specific population of their membership. Each doctor (or their office) are > free to do, or not do, anything with the information in these reports. Next I asked if the recipients had been surveyed on the usefulness of the reports and that's when the sender indicated: > Actually, no. It's something that we need to do so that we can potentially > consilidate reports and/or eliminate unhelpful reports. ## The Solution At the end we decided that before anywork was done to 'automate' the delivery of these reports, that we really needed to address the contents of the reports and determine which parts of them were helpful, and what parts weren't. Once we have a single report, or potentially a suite of reports, the automation and delivery work could actually start. By working through and trying to determine the actual problem that needed to be solved by asking questions to help both me and the requester better understand what the real ask was, we saved a ton of development time and have a better path forward for making the information we have more relevant and actionable by the doctors' offices. Will this work in every situation? Maybe not, but I believe it's a good starting point when trying to solve 'real world' problems in a work setting. Tech folks have a (sometimes deserved) bad wrap, but we can shed this negative impression by showing the people that request solutions from us that we're both working towards the same goal of solving the problem. | 2024-08-22 | how-to-ask-why-without-sounding-like-a-jerk | As technical folks working with non-technical folks sometimes the asks that come through are unclear. In order to get clarity on these we want to ask questions to get clarification on the ask, but it can be challenging to not sound like a jerk when we ask. This can happen … | How to ask why without sounding like a jerk | https://www.ryancheley.com/2024/08/22/how-to-ask-why-without-sounding-like-a-jerk/ |