TA Playbooks 1 - Ask why?

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This post is part of the TA Playbooks collection. See the introduction post for more background.

Use the question "why?" to drill down to the real reason people are asking for a thing, be that a piece of technology, a new feature, a new tool or to use a new language.

The trick is to ask it more than once. You may hear the term "5 whys" used as a technique in retrospectives and incident post-mortems. Use it to drill down to find the assumptions beneath what people are asking for and the causes beneath the symptoms that people are reporting.

Other questions to ask

More variants on this exist. Good questions to drill down into a situation are:

  • What are you trying to achieve?
  • Who do you think this will benefit?
  • What are the downstream impacts of doing this?
  • Why do you think that will happen?
  • Where did that information come from?