Item 16: Prefer Examples to Suggestions
Stop saying "I think you should do X".
I'd like for you to pause for a moment and think about how that last sentence made you feel. Did you immediately say to yourself "okay great!!" with a big smile on your face? Based on my past experience with how I've seen people react to other people (myself, unfortunately, included) try to command them to do something. They usually get defensive blahblah describe how people get
Instead, use examples from your own experience showing how your idea could be valuable, rather than proposing your idea outright. For example, instead of saying "I think you should make this API call return asynchornously and then expose a method for polling for job completion, rather than having the client wait for the entirety of the request", you could say: "I worked with a similar API to this once. What happened was we would make requests and they would frequently take too long / timeout because the job would take too long".
This accomplishes two things:
- It gives the stakeholder/customer the opportunity to decide what to do, which is a signal of mutual respect.
- It gives the stakeholder/customer the opportunity to ask you what to do, which means that they're soliciting this information out of you and won't be turned off by suggestions.
The science is that complex systems (BIBLIO ??? evolutionary biology?) behave in unpredictable ways. You instead have to give them information and see how they react to that information. Also arrow of knowledge.
p.s. The irony of this book being one big "I think you should do X" is not lost on me.