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I Don't Understand

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Re: I Don't Understand

#31

Post by [deleted] »

Evbn wrote: post #20
zaidf wrote: post #11

Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something. Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that " This was my mistake ". It is tempting to just fi…

Why does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Whence this antiquated notion that failures are to be blamed on a scapegoat?

[deleted]

Re: I Don't Understand

#32

Post by jaggederest »

Evbn wrote: post #20
zaidf wrote: post #11

Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something. Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that " This was my mistake ". It is tempting to just fi…

Why does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Whence this antiquated notion that failures are to be blamed on a scapegoat?

More to the point, people turn off their brains when they hear 'This was my fault'. They stop investigating further once the blame has been assigned.

It's more important to do the classic 'five whys' than to assign blame.

A scenario:

Maybe Joe forgot to do the maintenance task.

Maybe he forgot because he's been working overtime and is tired.

Maybe he's been working overtime because there aren't enough sysadmins.

Maybe there aren't enough sysadmins because hiring good sysadmins is difficult.

If you stop with just 'Joe's fault', you miss the point - time to spend some effort on recruiting new sysadmins. Worse, you might damage Joe's morale or even alienate him through punishment, even though that only makes the root cause worse.

Re: I Don't Understand

#33

Post by klibertp »

Evbn wrote: post #20
zaidf wrote: post #11

Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something. Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that " This was my mistake ". It is tempting to just fi…

Why does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Whence this antiquated notion that failures are to be blamed on a scapegoat?

I understand this the following way: when nobody claims "ownership" of a mistake, everybody (ie. in a team) feels guilty about it, even of they had no control over what lead to this mistake. If someone says clearly that it was his mistake, everybody else may stop worrying and either concentrate on something else or help mistaken person avoid such mistakes in the future.

This has nothing to do with scapegoats, but my understanding can be, of course, completely off.

Re: I Don't Understand

#35

Post by brandall10 »

kstenerud wrote: post #7

I first noticed this effect in college, when the prof would be talking about something that didn't make sense to me. If I remained silent, he'd never explain (of course) and I'd remain ignorant. However, whenever I asked him, everyone would start furiously writing down his explanation in their notes. So I got into the habit of saying "I don't understand". Inevitably, there would be quite a number of other people who…

Did you usually just say "I don't understand"... or was it more like "I get how a works with b when c occurs. But you lost me when you were talking about how it happens over z, I don't get the distinction, could you go into that?"

It's not about plain ignorance, but conscious incompetence. That can be a great deal of work to attain in a given domain, getting to that "I know what I don't know" place so you can actually make pointed questions. You have to have a fairly good map of the territory already to begin filling in the gaps.

Many of those people furiously writing probably didn't even know where to begin to ask... just write the stuff down now, understand later. Asking "I don't understand" doesn't make you look stupid, it's the follow-up "what don't you understand?", and then showing you can't even get into a proper discussion about your ignorance.

Re: I Don't Understand

#36

Post by sokoloff »

Evbn wrote: post #20
zaidf wrote: post #11

Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something. Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that " This was my mistake ". It is tempting to just fi…

Why does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Whence this antiquated notion that failures are to be blamed on a scapegoat?

At our shop, we drive to specific "causal" or "responsible" event/party so that we know, as best we can, what actually happened. Nothing punitive about it, and every one of my best colleagues have 5 or 6 figure losses that they had a prominent role in causing.

I only care who, what and how for the purpose of minimizing the chance of recurrence or to improve our response when a third-party causes a recurrence.

Re: I Don't Understand

#37

Post by Bockit »

I agree very strongly with the sentiment of the article, and would like to add that I think the flipped side of the "I don't understand" is just as important.

I.e., You're trying to explain something and someone doesn't understand, you should be patient with the person. I don't think it's always (or even greater than 50%) the case, but enough times after finding out what the lynchpin of understanding was there are ways I could have improved my first explanation.

Re: I Don't Understand

#38

Post by zaidf »

Evbn wrote: post #20
zaidf wrote: post #11

Making a clear statement such as "I don't understand" also is a great signal to your coworkers. It kills confusion and builds trust: I know that if you don't understand, you will let me know. That is much better than having someone who I have to poke to admit that they don't understand something. Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that " This was my mistake ". It is tempting to just fi…

Why does it matter who is responsible for a mistake? Whence this antiquated notion that failures are to be blamed on a scapegoat?

Why does it matter who is responsible for a mistake?

Because the person who makes the mistake is often in one of the finest positions to suggest ways to prevent the same and similar mistakes not just by him, but by others in the future. In all, that adds great long term value to the organization.

Accepting responsibility does not mean "blame" or "scapegoating". Blame and scapegoating is something done by others in the organization and reflects on a poor culture than someone accepting responsibility.

It does mean seeing a situation objectively. If Mary broke the site and she knows why, it helps no one to keep that a mystery. It helps everyone if the environment lets her come forward and say it was her mistake, this is the fix and this is how we will prevent this category of mistakes in future.

In fact, in order for this to work, you have to go out of your way to make sure that "responsibility" is not used to blame or scapegoat. If it is, people responsible will stop accepting responsibility.

Re: I Don't Understand

#40

Post by [deleted] »

kstenerud wrote: post #7

I first noticed this effect in college, when the prof would be talking about something that didn't make sense to me. If I remained silent, he'd never explain (of course) and I'd remain ignorant. However, whenever I asked him, everyone would start furiously writing down his explanation in their notes. So I got into the habit of saying "I don't understand". Inevitably, there would be quite a number of other people who…

[deleted]
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