We were deep into a big project for a school district: a new hosting platform for every school’s public website, with data integrations to HR, the student information system and more. Alongside it came a SharePoint Online site for each school, for everything that wasn’t public. It was the district’s first move to the cloud, and years of files on the old servers had to be migrated to the new sites.
That meant a lot of meetings with district executives.
The project manager and the kick under the table
Our project manager was a seasoned pro with plenty of big-enterprise experience, including several of the major oil and gas companies. She also happened to be Greek. At the time I had just seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the women of the family get the men to carry out their ideas while letting them believe the ideas were their own. I’m not sure if it’s cultural, but she played that same game very well with the mostly male IT leadership.
I was the lead architect, and not politically savvy. Before a meeting she would share a list of dos and don’ts. That ran up against my more blunt Germanic heritage, which gets worked up quickly over drops in quality or what looks like laziness.
I’d say something true, and get kicked under the table. That was my cue to put some icing on whatever I’d just said, and then shut up. She was good at handling the collateral damage.
The post-mortem
After each meeting we’d do a post-mortem. She would take a true statement I had made and ask me to restate it as a question. Then we’d walk through how each person in the room might have heard the two versions.
“The vendor’s data is a mess” lands as an accusation. Someone in that room owns that data, or chose that vendor, and now they’re defending instead of thinking.
“What would it take to get the vendor’s data clean enough to migrate?” lands as a problem to solve. The same people can now be part of the answer.
I had to admit her approach was definitely superior to mine. The challenge was teaching an old dog a new trick. I’m coming around.
What I learned
Questions don’t necessarily put people into a corner. Directly pointing out problems does.
A statement asks people to agree or defend. A question invites them to think, and often to arrive at the idea themselves, at which point they own it. That’s what makes it work.
This was the start of a longer journey for me into the power of questions, one that later led me to Socratic learning (see Only Ask Questions).
