What have you tried so far?

Earlier in my career, when an engineer would ask me for help with a UI problem, I’d jump in without question to help by investigating and solving the problem for them. I was being useful, I was being helpful, or at least, I thought I was at the time. It’s no big surprise that this pattern of behaviour, spread out across even more software engineers and larger teams, left me in a position of feeling overwhelmed.

I started to get frustrated that people would always come to me asking for help on problems I thought were fairly easy to solve, I was also pretty sure some of the people asking for help weren’t even trying to investigate at all before asking. I had less time to perform tasks, or solve my own more difficult specialized problems.

This all came from a behaviour I fostered because it made me feel like an expert to be the person solving other people’s problems. But in hindsight, I don’t believe it was as helpful as I thought it was.

Giving better help

Now when someone asks for help on a problem they can’t solve, I ask “What have you tried so far?,” this question transformed the way I collaborate with others on problem solving. It’s effective at changing the nature of people asking for help because it helps build empathy, it adds context, and it encourages others (possibly through risk of embarrassment), to spend some time taking steps to solving the problem themselves.

It helps build empathy by letting you know the pains a person went through to solve the problem unsuccessfully, you know they respected your time enough to spend some of their time learning about the problem. Even if they were miles away from the actual solution - the effort spent gives you a genuine desire to get them to that destination.

It adds context by giving you far more detail and understanding about the problem, after all you still might not know the answer to the problem right away - what did or didn’t they try yet? What was their deductive process? How does it differ from yours? This might be an opportunity to collaborate on a solution together.

Teaching a process

The value of the help goes beyond a short-term quick fix, to teaching a process, that teaching goes both ways, we both learn each other’s processes - and these processes can be repeated and taught to others and have a multiplying effect in an organization.

While it might feel like you’re revealing the ingredients of the secret sauce of your specialization, in my experience at least, the shared investigative process raises the bar of what we’re able to achieve together, and individually, because now we all have a broader toolset to work from in our problem solving.

We don’t typically go to a doctor and give no context - because we know if we did we might get an incorrect diagnosis and potentially wind up there the following week.

Having stronger relationships between people needing help, and the people giving it creates a more collaborative environment, one where the process of how we get to our answers is more important than the solution itself - giving more space for everyone involved and creating a more collaborative learning environment that’s extremely valuable for building better, more self-sufficient teams.