I was wrong about the iron in the hotel….or was I?

A couple of days ago I blogged about my experiences in the hotel in Frankfurt. How I had to travel down to reception to get someone to let me up to the 2nd floor where I could use the pressing room to iron my clothes.

It turns out that wasn’t entirely correct but this raises some interesting points which I believe are illustrative of many problems with software and processes in any organisation.

First, let’s look at what happened. In the interests of brevity I omitted a couple of facts about the iron situation in my other blog post. The most relevant of which was that I actually phoned reception and asked how to get to the “Pressing Room” on the 2nd floor. The person at reception answered me accurately with “come down to reception and someone will activate the lift to the 2nd floor for you”.

The problem this illustrates is that human nature is that every question about how to do something is treated as if you were asking for directions. If you ask someone for directions to get to somewhere then they will obviously say “you go down here, turn right/etc”. The point is that you can’t give someone directions to somewhere without knowing where they are to start with.

Unfortunately, with IT and many other things “where you are” is often not the best place to start. As Henry Ford elegantly put it “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, the answer would have been a faster horse”.

This is what we see with people trying to spec software a lot of the time. Frequently they say “can we just have a checkbox for this?” where they should be saying “I need to achieve this, what’s the best solution?”. It’s a subtle change but one that can make a huge difference.

In the iron example, when I rang reception and asked how to get to the pressing room, the best answer would be to say “come to reception and someone will activate the lift to the 2nd floor. However, we can send an iron and ironing board to your room if you prefer”. 

While they answered my specific question accurately, they didn't realise that I knew there was a pressing room and had assumed that meant they couldn’t send an iron to my room. Basically, I was asking the wrong question and if they had thought a bit more about why I was asking the question, they could have given me a better answer.

In life, everything we do is coloured by assumptions. That means we often don’t ask the right questions because we ask the question we want answered based on the assumptions we have made. In the same way, the person hearing the question will have their own assumptions that colour how they hear the question.

The interesting thing is that one of the main skills of a good systems architect is to look beyond the question that’s being asked. It’s not possible to change human nature and get someone to ask better questions all of the time. So the systems architect has to actually work out what is being asked and what the person asking it really wants to achieve, which is often not what they’re asking for.

So yes, I was wrong about the iron – I should have asked a better question!