“Just ask if you don’t understand something or need information, ok”, I have often received or given this very friendly advice in my professional life when I started somewhere new or helped someone with their first orientation in their new job. It was meant to signal a willingness to help and openness. All too often, I found myself confronted with incomplete information that I tried to mentally integrate into the overall concept or realized that my advice could only be understood correctly if people were familiar with my professional world of thought.
The request to ask when you need information assumes that the person supposedly asking knows about the questions.
Nevertheless, in the workplace, in communication with other companies, organizations or associations, I have learned that asking questions or being asked questions is more often the problem than I would have expected and that you are sometimes confronted with the accusation that you “could have asked beforehand” when sometimes something has gone wrong. And the answer: “I didn’t know that I should have asked something” is then obvious.
In my view, it is better to show the “big picture”, the goal, the motivation, or the direction to someone who is trying to familiarize themselves with a position, a field of work or a social and cultural structure. It is also helpful to not just put one word (or abbreviation) in the room and assume that everyone associates it with the same content that was meant.
A general overview may give rise to questions whose answers contribute to comprehensibility. And both – the questioner and the answerer – can coordinate their individual experiences, ideas and influences in order to reach a consensus.
And what was the question now?
Just a thought…