[teampractices] No questions allowed!

Fri Oct 13 00:30:10 UTC 2017

Hey,

Thanks for sharing.

It seems like for such a policy to not result in disaster, everyone needs a
good amount of empathy and willingness to cooperate. If you have an opinion
and person B has another opinion, person B cannot rely on you asking them
why they have this differing opinion in case where you want to know.
Instead they have to figure it out for themselves. At least assuming you
can't say something like "I wonder why you think that" or "Tell me why",
which while strictly are not questions, result in the "same" interaction
(different tone though).

Cheers

--
Jeroen De Dauw | https://entropywins.wtf | https://keybase.io/jeroendedauw
Software craftsmanship advocate | Developer at Wikimedia Germany
~=[,,_,,]:3

On 12 October 2017 at 22:13, Marti Johnson <mjohnson at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> This is such an awesome list.  I love getting a colleague's dream
> description in my work inbox!  Thank you, Kevin!
>
>
>
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> On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 1:01 PM, Kevin Smith <ksmith at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Last weekend, I had a dream, and this email is about that dream.
>>
>> I had just started working at an organization, as an Agile Coach (or
>> similar). I was surprised to learn that one of their important rules was
>> that everyone was prohibited from asking questions.
>>
>> Since a HUGE part of being an agile coach is asking questions, this
>> seemed insane to me. While trying to do my work, I kept starting to ask a
>> question, and then thinking through how to convey my point in a different
>> way.
>>
>> I pushed back, and asked why this rule was in place. The explanation
>> (remember this was a dream, so it doesn't have to be entirely coherent) was
>> something along the lines of: It's unfair for you to expect someone to
>> answer YOUR questions, because it makes assumptions about their goals and
>> interests. It puts them in a position of "answering to" you.
>>
>> As I continued to work within this odd framework, it became less
>> uncomfortable. There were cases where it was actually helpful, especially
>> since I sometimes have difficulty expressing my own preferences. Instead of
>> "What should we do next?", I might say "I think we should do X next". It
>> prevented people from using questions in a passive-aggressive way (which
>> can happen). And some people who were used to *only* speaking up when asked
>> a question found themselves force to speak up without prompting.
>>
>> For the rest of the night, even as I was in other, unrelated dreams, this
>> idea of "no questions" kept returning. By the end of the night, I felt
>> mostly at peace with it.
>>
>> I'm not advocating that we adopt this policy. But I encourage you to take
>> a few minutes and reflect how different your work life would be if you
>> weren't allowed to ask questions. For me at least, it was an interesting
>> thought experiment.
>>
>>
>> Kevin Smith
>> Engineering Program Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>>
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>>
>
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