731–740 of 811 posts
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Which cities?
NYC, LA, Oakland, Baltimore, Portland, and Minneapolis at least https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9625629/REFUND-poli...
So they didn't actually do anything.
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It can easily backfire. Some one who has an urgent but basic question might refrain from speaking up if, beforehand, a senior prefaces their pointed probing question with "this is a stupid question...". 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.
You don't say this is . You say "this may be" a stupid question. 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".
There's a bit of a disconnect between the the purported theme of this article, being okay looking stupid, and the actual contents, which is just a catalogue of times other people were stupid, posted on the internet so everyone knows the author is clever. Being willing to look stupid involves actually being able to deal with mistakes and failure, with actually _feeling_ stupid sometimes. Just listing a bunch of great…
But the article is specifically about looking stupid. The point being, as I understand it, that you should avoid being stupid but not looking stupid.
Maybe that's a subtle distinction, but I think it's important.
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Poor communication does not imply everyone involved is incompetent idiots. It's unfortunate, and important to address, but if you quit any project every time there is inadequate communication, you'll never get anything done. 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 b…
If you want to cut people slack, go cut them slack. Here's a question: look around you, you think cutting slack is what's needed? 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.
This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk…
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.
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> explain oneself I hate this, the idea that I should have to explain myself to a random stranger in a shop as if they are entitled to know anything about me. I buy a lot of sweets on Friday for the weekend and regularly the clerk behind the till will make a comment, "Thats a lot of chocolate! Who is going to eat all that! You must be having a party whats the occasion?". In front of a line of customers who are eager…
> no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again Even though I, personally, feel the way you do, the above doesn't ring true. Many people crave those small interactions with strangers, and welcome the opportunity to talk about themselves. That's the reason they're a social norm.
This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk…
One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, ." were two phrases she used all the time . 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. Mo…
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There is an interrogation technique called Five Whys. I believe it was created by S. Toyoda, and was and very is effective in root cause analysis. The basic idea was to ask a question and follow up with "Why?" until an answer contained an alterable behavior... that answer would usually come with the fifth why. Once in a while I use it in a business meetings, and as long as the person who is being questioned doesn't g…
5 Whys is great for getting depth into one causal subtree, but based on a paper I once read, answers can lack breadth when there is more than one cause (which is often the case). It said that "Why" is often best answered with a directed acyclic graph of causal relationships. (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…
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.