I Don't Understand
bjk5.com
bjk5.com
So I got into the habit of saying "I don't understand". Inevitably, there would be quite a number of other people who also didn't understand, but were afraid to ask, so I'd just ask first. That stuck with me throughout my career and served me well. If you don't understand, ask.
Also, contrary to common sentiment, there is no minimum competency level that grants you the privilege of saying "I don't understand." Ignorance is not a monopoly of the elite.
On the other side of the equation, I had one amazing EE professor who would write something on the board, and before he turned around would say to the class "You don't understand this", erase it, and take a better approach. He was able to tell when the class didn't get his explanation and would improve it real-time.
I think that it is the explainer's responsibility to explain it in a way that will be 1) understood by others 2) not intimidating, so if it's not understood, people will still feel they can ask.
Crafting an explanation in a way that others can follow is one of the most powerful and useful skills a developer or manager can strive to achieve, not just the ability to understand others who don't have this skill.
E.g. if I hear "I don't understand" I don't think "ok, this person is not getting it", but rather "my explanation should be better"
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.
I'm a teacher and I like students who ask me to re-explain or re-present a step in an argument. In fact, I use techniques designed to find out how much my students know and 'how they know it'. I teach fairly basic Maths, and different students learn the basics in different ways.
I'd like a student who could articulate which step in a complex argument is the issue even more! I usually ask follow up questions to find out where the issue is without putting the questioner on the spot.
This sounds interesting. Could you talk more about it?
A longer example is at
http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_algebra-revision-card-so...
Even if you aren't sure what you don't understand, narrowing your questions or explaining your reasoning on things you do understand (or think you understand, sometimes we all are wrong on some key assumption that changes everything) can help your tutor fill in the bits that help explanation. Further, this sort of exercise is an example of metacognition, which teaching theory suggests is a very vital part of directed learning.
A lot of times when I'm building something in a problem space I don't know very well, I like to keep guidelines loose, because I know that I'll be taking some leaps in development, and I know I'll be working in areas where I'm not fully competent.
For those reasons, it's hard for me to envision the project start to finish -- I'll know the general steps, but each implementation detail is a variably sized black hole that I can't peer into until I get deeper into it.
For things I'm more familiar with, I'm able to ask better questions, and more easily identify when something isn't going to work, or at least not work as expected. To the lay person, I appear dumber on the things I know better because I'm able to ask more specific questions, so I ask more of them until I'm 100% confident that I do understand, and generally, at that point I can just do what I'm supposed to. Where I'm less competent, I ask fewer questions up front, but then way more as I'm doing to make sure that what I've ended up with is going to meet expectations.
From the other side I find it incredibly useful to get questions while speaking and I wish I was better at encouraging them. When writing a talk you have to write for some imaginary audience who won't ever quite match your actual one. But if you can get them to start asking questions then immediately you have the opportunity to tailor what you're doing for the audience in front of you. It's a very satisfying feeling :)
Any tips from anyone here for making people feel more inclined to ask questions? Often the ones who could most benefit (and create the most benefit for others) are the the ones least likely to have the confidence to do it.
Become more of an asshole.
There are probably more eloquent ways of phrasing that, but I want something that will stick in your mind when you're actually on the spot, and that works.
The idea here is to stop caring quite so much about what others want and what others will think of you.
If you constantly worry that you're interrupting the flow and that you'll be bogging everyone else down, don't. Embrace the asshole side of you to ask the question and damn the consequences.
If you worry that the people around you will think you're dense, fuck them. They don't have the first clue about you, and you're in that class for you, not for them.
This! I believe this sums up the way people should behave when in a class.
Another personal favorite is stating unequivocally, loud and clear that "This was my mistake". It is tempting to just fix the mistake but even if you have fixed it, if there isn't clear declared ownership, you probably haven't addressed the root cause.
Doing this keeps you honest to yourself and also removes the awkward air where no one knows who is responsible for this mistake because no one has taken ownership. To pull this off you need an environment that won't punish mistakes by default.
There are absolutely fireable mistakes but if you do this right, the employee should volunteer to be let go because he realizes the gravity of his error.
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.
This has nothing to do with scapegoats, but my understanding can be, of course, completely off.
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.
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.
The smartest programmer in my workspace frequently looks for me when he's trying to solve something hard. There are a dozen people around us, at least, who are better able to _solve_ whatever problem he's working on. But they don't ask as many questions. I ask a lot of questions. Midway through explaining stuff he's solved his problem.
And meanwhile I've learned a ton.
To be honest most senior developers are guilty of not creating the right kind of environments for people to comfortably admit they don't understand something and then it brings the whole team down as a result. With exception of where I work now, the senior developers at all other large companies I've worked at made you feel stupid for admitting you didn't understand. There's no weakness in admitting you don't understand, but because of the way companies these days throw words like Agile and lean around, it's no surprise people are afraid to speak up when a company works in the form of 3 week sprints.
While it comes down to the volatile environments managers and senior developers have created over the years, a bad economy doesn't exactly help when it comes to admitting you don't understand something you were hired to do either.
When explaining things to a new hire I already know they don't understand everything, and I expect questions. Those questions help drive the discussion further in a way that hopefully fits in better with their thought process/learning style.
It is much more frustrating trying to explain things to people that just nod and have to be continually questioned to try and find out what they actually understand!
I wouldn't exactly say I don't know what I am doing, but even I struggle just like everyone else because I don't know everything and it's better to ask a colleague who might than it is to search Google. Managers need to train their staff to be more sympathetic and patient with new hires especially. Some places (by the sounds of it like yours) have created a comfortable environment where it's easy to ask for help and clarification, this is how it should be everywhere.
If you're senior and you say that you don't understand then you're opening the gate for everyone to discuss the issue in more detail; no junior workmates will feel dumb - even the senior guy doesn't understand it!
And chances are that the deeper discussion will unearth something I didn't fuly appreciate, even if I wouldn't have called "I don't understand" for other people's benefit.
If I go to an university lecture on advanced math, I won't understand things, and can say so. But it's unlikely the lecturer can say anything in the span of five minutes that will make me understand, since what would actually get me close to understanding the content of that lecture are several semesters worth of studies leading up to it.
The senior devs might be the only people on the room who do have such a solid grasp of their stuff that they can fill in their understanding with just a few minutes of explanation. Junior people don't understand either, but they might need to work over the new thing for hours, not five minutes, to get a proper handle on it, and you can't give an hours-long answer to someone who says they don't understand.
Almost every environment I've been in - whether it be high-school or grad-school, a corporate setup, a startup,; I've found that "I don't know"/"I didn't get you" goes a long way. The other person in the picture usually goes out of their way to make me understand what I'm missing.
And er, Donald Rumsfeld, when talking about unknown unknowns.
"He who asks a question may look like a fool once, but he who keeps his question to himself will stay a fool for the rest of his life."
Result-driven teaching in our societies fuels the natural fear of failure and of the look of your peers, when proper teaching should result in driving curiosity through one's own recognition of not knowing something as being a positive thing.
It's leagues better than working under the wrong assumptions for days, weeks, months...
Reminds me of The Checklist Manifesto which cites how OR nurses and doctors who communicated best--they know each others names and nurses can tell doctors "stop"--had fewer surgical errors.
And it also works the other way around: I cannot stand when a member of the team is too afraid/shy/... to say "I don't understand". (I'm not blaming the team mate as much as the work environment. Nevertheless it's still a very real problem).
When I get out of a meeting with coworkers and they said they understood (or implied it by not asking questions or saying "I don't understand") I really need to trust they do, or else major problems lie ahead.
The office is not the place for chest thumping dominance displays and contests of will.
Not all fields of programming or mathematics are as productive of fiddly gotchas: often an experienced specialist can judge rather reliably that a piece of work will be entirely routine, though time-consuming. I can only appeal to my informal anecdotal impressions for this in programming, but in mathematics I have some harder evidence: setting up machine-checkable proofs in HOL Light. The prover won't let me get away with any hand-waving or ambiguity: I really do have to dot every single i and cross every single t. In the end, doing that is routine (though often very tedious and messy --- people talk about spending a week to formalize a page of mathematics), and I am very seldom surprised by a part of a proof that I expected to be tedious instead turning out to require new insight.
The matter was important to "get". Hard to say if the annoyance was justified... but the result is this question may also backfire, even if it shouldn't.
It works against the biggest problem we all have miscommunication.
Great advice.
Equality among people academically and vocationally needs to be backed up by strong support and activism for greater social and economic equality. Otherwise trivial efforts to promote more participation are a farce, and nothing is ever going to change.
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.
In a negotiation for example, if you admit you dont understand something, the other party can use that factor to take advantage of you.
It also hurts your credibility in front of a wider audience when giving a speech for example.
While I do think being humble should be respected, modern culture will look down on those who admit they don't understand.
1) If you say you dont understand, you may appear to be a fool for a few minutes, if you pretend to understand (while you dont)... you are a fool for life.
2) To learn something knew, you have to set your ego(pretending to know lest you appear ignorant) aside and start humbly with basics.
How do we create an environment where one doesn't feel it's wrong to ask for clarification without being subject to "looking stupid"?
Make it clear that struggling is a perfectly normal factor of life -- in fact one could argue that intelligence is a measurement of someone's history of struggling.
One could even go so far that the top 5% of any class are simply people who have 'struggled' the most, or more to the point people who have stumbled (and overcome it) the most.
Here is an excellent article researching teaching methods in Japan:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggl...
Anyway, admitting you don't fully understand something is the first step to fully understanding it. Great article!
This also has the nice side effect of bringing a different perspective to an existing problem. It's a habit that has left several managers going "wow, you sure know what's going on, or you found problems that we'd not considered". I just shrug and reply honestly, "I'm just trying to understand."
It's of course also invaluable advice for students of any ages.