761–770 of 811 posts
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I think a couple cities did that, and quickly back-tracked because crime shot up.
Thats a robust and well researched opinion you have there.
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One thing you learn in sales is the value of open-ended questions. Until you consciously look at it, it's hard to realize how bad the questions we tend to ask are. 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 tru…
That depends. Yes/no questions are great when you want to quickly validate something. Open-ended questions are great when you want to get a lot of information. Yes/no are for confirmation, open-ended for exploration. Different goals.
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Hmm. Often times, an open ended question results in a much more accurate answer. Humans tend to approximate or even lie to force an answer to fit a limited choice question. Example: you want to know if water is falling out the sky. You ask: Is it raining? Response is no. You walk out the door and are rendered unconscious by golf-ball size hail. Better to have asked, "what's it like outside?" or, "what's the weather r…
Again, I think that depends on where you are in the exploration/confirmation spectrum. I don't really think about it when doing it, but usually I use open ended questions for stuff I don't know, and yes/no questions to link things to my existing mental model. 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 f…
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?
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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.
Depending on who is asking, the intention behind such framing is different. For someone in a leadership position, the point is to open up dialog and make folks comfortable enough to ask questions without them feeling they're at risk of humiliation or judgement. For others it may be to signal politeness and deference to the speaker. Whatever the case, there are more effective, more genuine phrasings to use than to lit…
Examples please?
I was thinking about:
"I'd like to ask some things that might be obvious to many of you: ..."
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It's "self deprecation", depreciation is something different. 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.
It's all about reading the room. If you're talking to a hostile crowd you're not going to expose weakness. I hope that most of these internal alignment meetings are not hostile, and are instead conducted with the intent to best deliver value to the business. In these instances, I have found comments like "I'm sorry to ask a basic question here..." work well to explain that I probably don't have as much domain experie…
(Probably the questions aren't literally stupid, or the person maybe would never have been hired in the first place)
One way to prove that he truly doesn't mind looking stupid would be to list times when he risked looking stupid... and it turns out he actually was. It's happened to all of us though we dont like to admit it. I'm sure it's happened to him too and I looked but I didn't see any of those examples listed. Giving only examples of when people thought he was dumb and it turned out he wasn't... that's kind of just a roundabo…
This is not "willingness to look stupid", it's obviously the will/need/want to look mysterious to stroke one's ego.
He could have chosen to behave like a good human and say why he wanted a smaller box so no one looks stupid (he to the the employee and the employee to him) and even give some new insights to the employee to help another customer with the same needs.
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That just sounds like corpratese though, the stupid question is much better in my opinion. 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.
They sound like someone avoiding directly admitting that they don't understand something. Unwillingness to look stupid.
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>> 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. 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…
> 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. 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…
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> I usually say, "please ask stupid questions, because if you don't then you'll run off in the wrong direction and work on the wrong thing for a week before the next review, and you'll have wasted a lot of project budget." 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.
So far it completely depends on the person. 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 t…
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?"
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I've had PMs always lead questions like that, using "this is probably a stupid question..." and alternatives and I came to dread discussions with them, as I knew this meeting would involve loads of wasted time constantly 'excusing' their question instead of just asking it.
Just how long do they draw it out? Phrasing "So, stupid question: [insert question" really shouldn't add that much time, right? Or is the problem that the questions really are stupid? 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!