Ask Your Question (Sorta)

Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.
– Tony Robbins

Been banging my head against a design question at work – just couldn’t figure out how a certain piece of the system should behave. Every possible solution seemed to cause more problems, and none of them were going to be cheap or easy to implement, so I didn’t want to pull the trigger until I was confident.

I also didn’t want to ask my boss, because the question was hard to phrase and he wasn’t in the office where I could simply show him the problem. That should’ve been my first warning, right there – the question was hard to phrase.

Eventually I decided I was wasting time and that it made more sense to just ask him, struggle through the confusion, and be able to move forward. I started to write the question in our instant messenger, and it looked odd. The answer looked obvious – I knew immediately what my boss would say, and what I’d have to say to clarify the problem.

So I rephrased the question to encompass that, and it still looked obvious. I imagined what he’d ask in return and answered that in the question, as well. Once I did that, I knew exactly what he’d say and it was pretty clearly the right answer. There was still some doubt, of course – he’s surprised me before – but I was suddenly very confident about which path he’d ultimately want me to take.

So I just took it. None of his time used up, and much faster than actually pinging back and forth until we understood each other would have been.

This is very similar to knowing what’s next (and one of the reasons that skill is so important.) You’ll often think you can’t move forward until a question has been answered, but the question in your head is actually too vague to answer at all.  For me, actually writing an email or message that asks the question of someone else can really clarify the issue at hand, often so much that I don’t need to ask anymore.

Next time you’re floundering, step back and answer a different question: “What, exactly, do I need to know here to move forward? Who could tell me? How would I ask them?”

You might find you can answer the question. You just weren’t asking it.