So, I had this thought today while I was working on a completely unrelated problem. (Don’t worry, this is only going to touch my life as a programmer briefly.)
Most of the time, people ask the wrong questions. Because they ask the wrong question, they normally either can’t find the solution, or they find a solution, but it is the wrong solution. Asking the right question should, therefore, be the primary concern when trying to solve a problem.
Now, I see this all of the time in the work that I do as a programming coach. Some very smart people will ask me how to do some programming thing. Invariably, when I dig deeper, I find that they’ve chosen the wrong solution.
Today this happened again. The question I was asked was “How do I restore a backup from SQL 2000 into SQL 2005?” The question he should have asked was, “How do I move a SQL database from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005?” He was assuming you’d do it by backing up from 2000 and restoring into 2005. But, if he had asked the second question, I could have just told him, “Move the files.” Which is a much easier answer than the answer to the original question.
But, it occurred to me that most of the time we ask the wrong questions. We assume we know what the solution is, so we go about the task of solving the micro problems the solution presents to us.
Worse, many times we assume we know what the problem is, so we go about solving it while the real problem lays untouched.
I can think of a number of time when, as a parent, I assumed my kids were doing things for one reason when they were actually doing them for a completely different reason. My first impulse was to assume that my child was misbehaving because he really wanted to tick me off. Once I finally learned to ask questions, I found an entirely different world inside my kid’s brains. Actually, one of my kids really does have an entirely different world inside his brain.
You’d think with all the practical experience I’ve had as a consultant that this would be easy to implement in my daily, non-programing life. But, most of the time, I still assume the problem is something that it is not, and if I just spent a little time to dig deeper, we’d get to the real issue and find a real solution.
On the other hand, some times, no matter how hard you try, you never get to the real issue.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Tagged with: thinking