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How to Avoid Ineffective Communication (Part Two)

2023-03-22

This article mainly discusses a recent representative case of ineffective communication.

Personal information and sensitive information have been omitted in this article. The text has been slightly adjusted for the sake of explaining the issue.

How to Avoid Ineffective Communication (Part One)

1. Event Details

One day, colleague A posted a question on the company's Q&A system with the following content:

Text Only
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After installing DCA on k8s, an error occurred: Please check if the DataKit token is correct.

Which SaaS site or Deployment Plan?
  Guangzhou SaaS
  datakit 1.5.7

Error description:
  See screenshot

Colleague B, who received the question, had no idea what it was trying to express and felt his time was wasted. This led to the following conversation:

Colleague A Colleague B Can this FAQ be supplemented with some textual descriptions? Those unfamiliar with the details won't understand what the red box is supposed to mean. What’s unclear? You’ve only described an objectively existing error message. If this error is unreasonable, please specify your expected approach. From the screenshot, "Please check if the token is correct," this is clearly an intentional setting. If you provided the correct token, please provide evidence (such as a screenshot of XXXX). If you think this design is unreasonable, please propose your solution.

2. Commentary

"Raising a question" must first ensure that a "question has indeed been raised."

In this case, colleague A simply took a few screenshots without actually "raising a question." It was inevitable that colleague B couldn’t understand it.

When we ask questions, we should assume the other party knows nothing about the entire situation, and necessary background information must be clearly explained, such as:

  • What am I doing?
  • What materials are being provided (screenshots, logs, etc.)?
  • What effect do I expect or anticipate?
  • What actually happened?

A typical example of a confusing question looks like this:

Asker Responder Exception: request timeout What's going on here? This makes no sense without context!

The correct and complete way to ask a question should look like this:

Asker Responder I’m calling the POST /modify-workspace interface of the XXX system, but the following error occurred: Exception: request timeout The full request is as follows: POST /modify-workspace
{
  "data": {
    "name": "Developers and testers use together"
  }
} Alright, let me take a look.

Everyone should avoid laziness when communicating at work, especially when asking questions, and should not ask incomplete questions.

Although it may save a few minutes when asking the question, if the responder doesn’t understand the problem, they will still need to repeatedly confirm, which ultimately does not save time and instead wastes both parties' time, making it counterproductive.

I hope everyone can gain something from this article!