I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. She knew how to ask them in such a way that gets the person talking in greater detail.

It's kind of like being a great interviewer, there's a technique to asking questions in a manner which gets someone talking.

She’s big on that exact phrase of “this could be a really stupid question, but…”

She’s also really good about making sure other people are rewarded for doing the same by reassuring someone asking what might be a dumb question as, “that’s a a great question and I’m sure others were wondering the same…” before responding.

Great leadership, IMO.

This was great for two reasons: 1. it builds up large common ground for understanding; 2. if someone in a leadership position does this, others will not feel ashamed of asking questions that they think may be basic.

We were there to discuss a technical implementation.

She kicked it off by saying "Let me start by asking a simple question, why do we do this function?"

I am now considered a domain expert. I love this question. It surprises me at how few people start with the why, or even can articulate the why.

The room of experts, were assembled to roll out a new product in their area of functional expertise. None of us had an articulate answer as to the why. She kept on asking. She gently challenged bad answers with a follow up why. Then when everyone gave up, she gave her answer as to the why. It was brilliant.

Always start with the why. Then ask why again. Keep on asking until you understand why.

(Though when I tried to use a causal DAG for root cause analysis of an incident at my current company, I was told that I was wasting time and no one cares. But I thought the data I found was pretty interesting and worth exploring.)

You keep asking "why?" and only want one 'thing' to be 'actionable'... you will raise my frustration level. The root cause is an emergent property of understaffing, poor communication practices and a belief that everything can be reduced to a jira card providing sufficient context and understanding for a diverse audience with different skills and needs.

It's really hard to do RCA when people are blaming themselves. It had to suck to be in that meeting. A really good RCA isn't about finding a single actionable thing, it's about finding our what the root cause of the problem is... which in this case, might have been whatever originally broke production and caused an emergency fix that failed three times.

Often, the root cause is someone made a mistake. You can say there should have been other systems to prevent/review/etc, but the root cause is a mistake a person made. You can '5 whys' it to death, but I made a mistake (or... someone did).

"whatever originally broke production" - in this case, I made a mistake. That mistake wasn't caught until production. Then the fixes were all broken too.

I don't always blame myself for everything, but if I've made a mistake, I'll own up to it. For me, it helps me be aware of what I can do to avoid those in the future. This may or may not be some rca-checklist other people can refer to, because... it's not 'actionable' to anyone but me.

In manufacturing there is usually 4 big topics (person, machine, material, method), but there are many variations that can be used.

Trees or other visual depictions can be used too.

The point is to have some sort of structure and adapt it to your needs.

As someone who's recently been put in a position to make sure everyone's aligned (and failing quite a bit at it), it sounds like genius, in my opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

When you already (think you) know the answer, then it's a pedagogical technique. That's ok unless you happen to be wrong about the answer.

To stay respectful, it is polite to negotiate with all participants in its use.

I always ask people why, because I sometimes learn something new, I often learn about the knowledge level of the other participants, and it anchors everyone to the fundamental problem we are trying to solve.

I like it when they ask basic questions. at least then I can then explain the basics to them without having to feel like I'm patronizing.

Also, I just took a training and observed the trainer hear a participant say that she felt frustrated with the process, and then the trainer immediately asked the room something like, "How many other people are feeling frustrated as well?" And of course, numerous hands went up, and it seemed to help show the person she wasn't alone.

Yes/no questions are the worst. But even questions like "What did you do?" aren't great because the answers can often be rather short.

A better question is often posed like "Tell me about X" or "Describe how you did Y".

Of course this isn't universally true, there is value in binary answers.

But often you may find yourself, let's say in a sales context, asking something like "What tool are you using for project management?"

The answer will then be something like, "I'm using Jira".

Instead, if you ask, "Tell me about what you're doing for project management on your team", the answer may be much more detailed.

"We follow the agile methodology and use Jira for our task management. We've got a dedicated project manager on the team who..."

Getting good at asking the right questions is worth the effort.

Better to have asked, "what's it like outside?" or, "what's the weather right now?"

and nobody is going to say it’s not raining when it’s hailing outside… but I understand if that was just a metaphor. You’re probably asking that question to figure out what kind of clothes to wear, and they would probably infer that. It’s so contextual though.

That also depends on the person. With some people open ended questions are great, with others yes/no are better.

I'll also add that yes/no questions are often faster if you get the response you expect.

Is it raining or something else outdoors?

Do you like Vi or Emacs or something else?

Do you want to hang out for a coffee or something else?

For the "Is it raining outside", I honestly don't know anyone that would just tell me "no" when there's hail outside. For the "Do you like Vi or Emacs or something else?", it would be "What text editor/IDE do you use? Why?". "Do you like Vi or Emacs" by itself is not a yes/no question, it's a "what box are you in" question. For "Do you want to hang out for a coffee or something else?", that would be something like "Do you want to hang out at <TIME>?".

An important part for me is that in yes/no questions, no are supposed to be the exception. In my mind, when I ask them, it's not a 50/50 chance. It's more of a 80/20. If it was a 50/50 chance, that means my mental model is not precise enough.

Most of them were illiterate and did not understand what plant scientists or professors were talking about re inputs or seeds or Tractors etc needed to modernize Ag.

So the format would be an interview in the middle of a coconut grove or a farm. The interviewer(usually female) would ask a question and the expert would answer. After he finishes answering, she’d turn towards the camera and go like “what you are basically saying is..” or “what he is saying..”..and she’d give the wrong details. Then the expert would interrupt her and explain it again with the correct answer. There were a lot of English words he’d use and she’d break them down in the vernacular and also in the same order as his sentence.

These wrong things repeated by her were obvious misunderstandings anyone unfamiliar with fertilizer application would make…it was probably scripted so that the answer can be ‘corrected’ multiple times and also probably reflected mistaken notions by the viewer. Never once was the viewer(here, it was the illiterate non English speaking village farmer) made to feel dumb but always as though they are learning something valuable and special.

It was like Sesame Street for farming adults. It was awesome and kept me glued to the television screen. I would memorize all the IRRI rice hybrids and probably was the only one in school who knew IR20, IR64 and IR8…and urea application rates for them.

Ask anyone of a certain age who their favourite Sesame Street character is …and you would have cracked effective communication technique for that time period.

I often ask these "stupid" questions, though. I usually start with: "it might have been said in other meetings, but just to be sure, what is...", "I might be a bit slow, could you explain X once again just to make sure I understand it", "So just to paraphrase what we've been discussing, X is Y, is that correct?", and sometimes I just ask "what does $acronym stand for and why is it important for us now".

I, too, often find that nobody knows the answers to very basic questions and we are in a meeting of 6-12 people...

No, I often legitimately think that my question might (!) be stupid, because I'm aware that I'm coming into the discussion with less domain knowledge and experience than the other people in the room. I still think it's good for everyone (ie, not just me) to explain. (Sometimes it's clear that everything is just out of my league, in which case I shut up and let the meeting go on.)

Asking fundamental questions in order to build up to a more complex understanding is the most effective way to learn, I have no hesitation about asking such questions.

It's better to just kick things off with naive questions or even use a bit of humor to disarm people, so they don't feel like they have to be "advanced" all the time.

The point is not that anyone with the same question should feel stupid; it's that I don't care if anyone thinks I am.

Whatever the case, there are more effective, more genuine phrasings to use than to literally invoke "stupidity".

Examples please?

I was thinking about:

"I'd like to ask some things that might be obvious to many of you: ..."

Folks who are good at communicating can always keep everyone feeling engaged and comfortable, while still getting to nitty-gritty WITHOUT resorting to saying stuff like "... this is stupid question, but...".

If you think they're being disingenuous because you think they do understand what's going on, then it actually supports why they feel the need to preface their question with that phrase. You expect that they know it, so they make questions around it less jarring by admitting that they probably don't know enough.

It's important to treat yourself with respect, but people also respect when you admit that you don't know something simple.

I'm not sure what kind of audience you think it works on.

I tend to get (particularly from people under 40) one of two inappropriate reactions to reflexive self deprecation - either exaggerated sympathy for my plight, or treating it as an exposed weakness to attack.

Sure...but I think that an insight that I've gained is that this is an example of a formula which doesn't really communicate or explain all the things you mention. You aren't sorry, you don't know that your question is basic, and you don't think you're wasting peoples' time.

In effect, it's a "pointer" to a bunch of things, so it only works with people that are conditioned to such things and have them in their memory. One of the things you mention, "not trying to school them" sounds to me like deference, and I don't think deference can be quickly established without a formula. Like a salute, you have to do something arbitrary in a mutually understood way.

(Probably the questions aren't literally stupid, or the person maybe would never have been hired in the first place)

Yes, some people will pity you, or treat it as a weakness. But having the courage to admit when you don't know something is a valuable trait that most people (in my experience) respect.

Also if you demonstrate your knowledge in other areas and contribute value to the meeting, people tend to forgive a few stupid questions in another area.

It's like when I'm having a meeting with my manager and I want to talk, so I start, they stop, I apologize for interrupting, and they say no, no, go on.

I assume there is no emotional drama going on. If they really want to continue talking, they can do so. That's why I apologize and pause. I'm not sorry, but I need to show appropriate deference.

It would be unfortunate if someone was building up resentment because they're not on the same wavelength about appropriate behavior. The purpose of etiquette seems to me to provide a formula to negotiate common situations without having to navigate emotional complexities.

But when different people have different rules, there's not much that can be resolved.

I’m reminded of Arthur Dent (British) in the Hitchhiker’s Guide telling Zaphod, modestly, “oh, it was nothing” about something great he did, and Zaphod responding along the lines of “oh, it was nothing? In that case forget it then”, which was not at all what Arthur intended.

But being self-deprecating was not one of them. I feel like I'm surrounded by Zaphods, or something, and I'm not sure when it happened.

I prefer to say things like "I'm not fully up to speed on this, so let's go back to basics/fundamentals for a moment", or "sometimes we're so focused on the details that we can't see the wood for the trees - let's take a step back and just run through it at a high level again".

With yours it's to easy for someone to switch off and not hear what you said because they think you're talking bullshit.

In two sentences you managed to cram in 5 idioms/phrases that are basically corporate babble.

I use it all the time. Oftentimes they are stupid questions. Sometimes they're not, but generally that's when I'm not sure if it's a stupid question or not. And that's okay—the point is, it's fine to ask stupid questions.

I ask questions that have a decent chance of making me look stupid all the time. Even when the rational part of my brain says "if you have this question, it's likely that other people do too," there's a big part of me that worries, "nah, I'm the odd one out here."

I preface some of my statements with this, and I fully expect them to be stupid. In fact, many of the questions I ask that I don't preface with the above disclaimer are in fact quite stupid.

This is my approach when getting pulled into something. If I have no idea, I want to get that idea. I'll also use "this may sound stupid, but..."

One of the smartest people I've ever met in business was also this way. He also never nodded his head in agreement unless he actually understood and agreed. If he wasn't sure, he'd pause for a minute and work it out, even if it meant pausing the flow of the meetings. Some people interpreted it has him being "slow" but it really meant he actually understand all of the things he was nodding to.

At my work, there's a bad combo of senior folks who whip off vague instructions in a single sentence, and junior folks who are afraid to ask questions. I'm in the middle, and I try hard to demonstrate that it's fine to badger the senior folks with questions, and to check in with them constantly. The senior folks like it because it gives them confidence that you're working it out. But some of our straight outta school colleagues just don't do this ("Gotcha. Sounds good!" is a very common email reply from them) and it leads to confusion down the road. After giving them the "ask questions" talk two times, I usually give up on them.

Also, in my position, I often have to review and edit reports that are largely written by electrical engineers and architects, and they all probably think I'm super dumb. I read the reports as the target audience (often non-subject matter experts), and so my comments are things like, "What do you mean by this [basic EE concept]?" I don't preface it with, "I know what this means, but the client might not, please elaborate..."

Does it help?

This sounds like they are expected not to waste time, so it might get even harder to ask a stupid question a minute too late, and especially to ask something tomorrow.

But you’re right that it might not be the best technique. I understand the hesitancy to ask questions after a certain amount of time has passed.

I work as a consultant and our time has to be billed to projects. The onboarding stinks, so the new hires often have no concept of billability/utilization nor project budgets. So I’m trying to drill in those concepts, too.

One of the additional lessons here is “the boss doesn’t always know what they’re talking about.” And that’s another hard one for them to accept. Question authority! If the instructions aren’t clear, then they might be nonsense. Have the guts to challenge the boss. And sometimes the challenge can come in the form of a million stupid questions.

As an aside, do you think there is a business opportunity in teaching companies better onboarding? Growing headcount seems like an afterthought most places, and it’s a colossal waste.

The worst example I’ve seen is one company hiring some very expensive onshore consultants to build the basic structure of the application and then quickly hand it off to cheap offshore ones.

What really happened is that the onshore guys created a horrendous mess of untested and undocumented code full of bugs that the offshore ones had no hope of making sense of. And being remote and from a culture of high power distance further exacerbated the problem. It certainly worked out well for the onshore guys who got to bleed the client out of a whole other year’s worth of expensive hours.

So, maybe. It’s risky, like you’ve demonstrated.

Something like this maybe: go to the new person, in the beginning every day, then once a week, then once a month, and say:

"Can you please ask three (3) basic questions about things you're slightly struggling with, and that you think everyone expects you to know, but that you don't?"

Dumb question here, but is it as simple as starting your question with "how" or "what" rather than "does"? The former invite explanation and the later looks for a yes/no.

My big thing lately is to not ask rhetorical questions (which can be sarcasm in disguise) as they either cause people to be defensive or simply agree. Either way they do not speak directly about the "obvious" problem.

Yes, this is the 101 of basic interviewing in journalism. Inexperienced reporters often ask too many "does" questions and are puzzled afterwards as to why the interviewee didn't talk much.

"Does" is also used when the journalist aims or pushes for a straightforward, yes-or-no answer. For example to interfere to a politician who is trying to avoid direct answers by trolling the interviewer with some off-topic agenda.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

Also, this is a funny proposal with regard to the Five Ws: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/additions-to-th...

I really appreciate that you used the technique that people were discussing and it still seemed to work here, at least it worked on me. I found myself thinking, "No no, that's not a dumb question at all and I feel grateful that you asked it!"

So, thank you for that meta experience :-)

I like this because I feel like it kind of de-stigmatizes asking "obvious" questions. If you acknowledge that the the question might be redundant, but ask it anyway, I think it makes the dialog more approachable.

I have a weird job title but my position is probably closer to your PM, and I also use this strategy, so I'd like to know how to not annoy people!

When you active listen, even if the question might feel stupid, the feeling gets lost in the fact hat the other person is receiving your attention. This technique is also teach for other contexts like counseling, or debating using the Socratic method.

Luckily, I've always been around coworkers that never put me down for asking those questions.

I also preface with saying I'm going to ask stupid questions and if anyone holds it against me I'm ok with it. If I'm asking a question it's usually because I don't understand a consequent of something someone said that everyone seems to just nod their heads and agree with, and that gives everyone an opportunity to reconsider the fundamentals.

This is not easy to learn, and great understanding ability is a prerequisite.

I guess you might be asking straight up binary questions like - is it happening due to xyz? Maybe, changing the question format to something like - what do you think could be the cause behind _fill the situation here___? Just my humble opinion.

inquisitiveness during problem solving is admirable and good, but in the article many of the applications of 'looking stupid' only serve to render the author untrustworthy.

“Just making sure I understand this correctly… stop me if I’m wrong” has worked wonders for my ability to contribute to a meeting.

This is debugging 101. You have assumptions about how a system works, but the output isn't matching those assumptions. You walk backwards over your assumptions and test them to see if they are true. Eventually you get to the precise place where your assumption is wildly different than the output, and there is your bug.

The more systems (or people) involved, the longer it takes, the more complexity.

In the spirit of doing less work, he proposed to me changing the meaning of "someProperty" to mean something different, without changing the name of that property.

Also, it was a boolean; so he wanted true values to actually represent false, and vice versa.

I politely pushed back on that one.

Last question was followed by the longest silence I ever heard in a meeting... I wasn't invited the next meetings. I heard it took them more than 5 other meetings to reconsider my solution. An intern has finally been sent to buy the hard drive last week.

There are ways to create roundabouts so that the solution looks “elegant” but only after “hard thought”.

There’s also the risk that the simple solution has some real limitation (eg. some regulatory issue) then you’ll will indeed look stupid

Maybe then they didn't want you in the meetings?

(Whilst the idea was good so that's what they did in the end)

(200 Go = GB I suppose)

My favourite examples are things like "what is a user?" - the marketing department may be counting leads generated, engineers are thinking about records in a database table, some other team may think of users as company or group accounts.

This holds true for all kinds of other things too. You might have a project called "the login optimization project" and find that some people think it's about page load performance while others think it's about increased conversions.

For this reason, I'm always ready to ask the stupid questions.

I have spent far more time than should be necessary aligning on terms like "customer" and "user."

In this situation I feel some anxiety or hesitation about asking these questions, but I don't feel it as a fear of appearing stupid. Instead the anxiety seems to come from worrying that I am annoying or offending everyone with questions about things that are obvious.

I have no way of knowing which question is going to reveal the problem, so I will need to shotgun questions. I know that some people that I work with get this completely and will cooperate. Others will get defensive or tune out, so I need to find a balance or tone to try to avoid that.

It is similar to when I did tech support as a teenager and someone would call with a problem, wanting a tech sent to their house. I would start asking questions about the problem and they would not want to spend 5 minutes going through a few steps to try to solve it over the phone. I never felt that they thought I was stupid, I just felt they were impatient. Maybe they did think I was stupid, but I was so sure that I could find the answer that I never considered that.

I guess I still work this way although I've fallen out of the habit of warning people and asking them to humor me.

Turns out I absolutely cannot do tier 3 support, but I can do 1 and 2 for friends and family and I'm the "whiz" or whatever. Tier three, for me, was basically me in a bad mood talking to me in a bad mood, in order to gatekeep the poor dev/DBA/NOC that had to actually fix things. No thx!

Playing dumb, if you will, has served me well, yet it is also odd to me just how often it needs to be employed in the field of software.

Plenty of otherwise good things can be signs of dysfunction. An example could be a workplace where people are free to chill, do what they want, ride scooters, play games, etc., which can be really healthy and good for creativity, but also may be a sign of weak leadership and nothing actually getting done (wasting time and jeopardizing the future of teams). Having process is usually better than no process at all, but process can also waste time and be counterproductive.

In other words, nothing is necessarily to be viewed as good or bad.

It happen for me once, and this was an humility lesson.

Now I keep in mind I can feel I understand the problem then realize later I was all wrong too.

I've been in other organizations (and even within this one) where my stupid questions revealed nothing new except that I had to go back and do some studying before I could usefully contribute.

I remember when I took a course in General Relativity as an undergraduate; I was much more math/CS focused than most people in the class, who were mostly physics people. And we would get together in study groups, and although I was respected for my general intelligence, it became clear that the questions I was asking were simply not the right ones -- that a physical/geometric intuition was something I did not have. In other words, I was actually the stupid one.

Much later I took a course in differential geometry, and eventually started seeing how it made sense mathematically, but I could never really connect it back to physical intuition. I think the problem that broke me was talking about the behavior of a point mass, and I had literally no idea how to attack that with the tools we had.

Personally, I don't really care about this second-order effect that asking such questions might identify others that don't understand the problem correctly. I think it's, as you say, creating its own bias that pollutes your thinking. I've worked with enough experts outside of my own domain expertise, that this is not something that happens often.

I'm grateful to my parents or whatever it was that enabled me to not take myself too seriously and not care too much about people thinking I'm stupid, even at work, and even though it may cost me dearly in terms of career progression. (because I do think not all but many people who get ahead do so by very successfully avoiding being perceived as stupid, even if they are)

I can highly recommend reading, or listening to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Asking "stupid" questions does not automatically make you intelligent, but it is a trait of highly intelligent people, exactly because of the reasons you describe.

We all know the story about how Newton asked why an apple fell to the ground, surely a lot of people would have thought you're a total idiot for asking that, and yet at the same time no-one would have been able to explain why.

The reason stupid questions are uncomfortable is that you're very likely to insinuate other people don't know the answer to a simple question, and we don't like making other people uncomfortable. Which is why you have to be humble when asking them.

I've had similar situations, it feels analogous to group based "rubber ducking"... having someone ask the questions perceived to be known or obvious by the existing groups can be extremely beneficial for all kinds of reasons, in the same way that a rubber duck (real or imagined) will get you to re-evaluate all of your assumptions and usually get you to find the assumption that's incorrect or problematic.

I brace myself. I'm going to waste your time. This is super obvious.

Here it goes: so uh, why do you continue to work with incompetent idiots instead of finding a workplace where people know what they are talking about instead?

Assumptions are inevitable. They get harder to question the longer they go unquestioned. Newcomers to a group can see them better.

Perhaps cutting people some slack and helping them work better by asking basic questions is a skill we all need to learn.

If you think so, alright then. I don't.

I think it’s OK to ask dumb questions twice. If you don’t get it by the third time (or fail to remember), then we might need to step back and revisit fundamentals, or your mental model might need adjustment so that the information makes sense in context.

Everyone sometimes screws up. Some more than others. Some distractingly so, and some so often that it's not worth continuing the relationship. But the mere fact that someone at some point screws up does not make them irredeemable. So, yes, I think cutting people slack is important.

This is totally orthogonal to being qualified for a job, or being good, or any other attributes people have that puts them out of their depth. If you work with a bunch of unqualified poseurs, then sure, slack isn't what's missing, and you should quit. But if you find yourself in that situation very often, I'd be asking different questions...

And. What if it's your customer in the room? Are you firing them for being 'stupid'?

The superclever types that thing their colleagues are stupid are often the most dangerous, as they'll just 'go it alone' and then leave when they fuck up and suddenly everyone is stupid and not grateful.

A team I work with sometimes was blocked on a couple of PRs for about a week. I needed one of the team members for something and their lead wasn't doing much to help remove his roadblocks to helping me so I stepped in asking my really basic questions about what they were trying to achieve.

Within about 30 minutes we released one PR and deleted the other. The one we deleted was blocking the other but there wasn't actally a need for it due to some spec change that happened earlier, just nobody could figure out why it was needed or what needed to be finished before it could ship.

(I’m not saying it’s a good thing)

This works and should be encouraged if you are indeed very smart and very quick, typically introverted and are actually going to be rolling up your sleeves to pitch in.

This approach is painful for everyone else and should be discouraged if you are a very extroverted and very non-technical person with no plan on actually helping out whatsoever with the actual execution on solving the problem at hand and really are only contributing to look smart in front of any leadership who happens to be in the room.

Definitely be aware of the Dunning–Kruger effect - which is a cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.

I don’t know what it is about the IT trade, but so many people seem to find it difficult to admit that knowing everything is impossible.

> I brace myself to be the idiot.

I don't think not knowing something makes one an idiot. Having hard time understanding something does. I don't think your example applies here.

It's amazing how frequently fancily dressed, well speaking, high paid people sit in rooms and essentially role play being adults while just having absolutely no clue what is going on.

I have seen a few people unwilling to admit that they don't know...when they're supposed to know. The easiest way out they come up with is 'we will discuss this offline'.