Asking for help
When do you ask for help? Do you ask it immediately before you know what questions to ask, do you stew on the problem for a bit and then ask informed questions, or do you wait until until you’re completely blocked?
I’ve been thinking on this quite a bit since PSL, where one of the exercises brought it to light. In the exercise the class was divided into halves and each was given four hours to complete the task at hand. Both groups had at least one experienced consultant available to help them if they chose to “hire” them (the price for our consultant was a Starbucks decaf latte and plenty of water to stay hydrated).
My group quickly became divided over the question of whether or not to retain the consultant. Several of us wanted to retain her early in order to have access to her expertise and to help prevent us from falling into any traps. A second faction wanted to wait until we had a specific question or a clear need for her skills before engaging her. The third faction did not want to ask for help at all and instead wanted to go it alone.
Faction #2 initially won out and we began working on the exercise, but throughout the morning we revisited the question as problems arose. Several hours into the exercise we decided to retain her after realizing how little progress we were making.
As we were already well down a path of action, the consultant insisted upon limiting her involvement to an observer role, which did not allow us to capitalize on her significant expertise. We did eventually identify a course of action and successfully complete the exercise but after a retrospective we all agreed that we had made it much more difficult than it needed to be.
So back to the original questions. If you think about situations you’ve experienced, which faction do you tend to fall into? How well did that choice work out for you? In hindsight was there a better course of action available?
For myself, I typically fall into the extremes: I ask before I think through the problem or wait until I’m fully blocked. In the former case I potentially waste someone’s time when I could easily find the answer while in the latter I waste my own time unnecessarily. I’m not sure there’s a happy medium for me, but at least I’m thinking about it and hopefully that will be enough to cause a behavior change.
