Can you count to a million?
I was asked by my 4 year old if I could count a million. I said no and refused to try however, he insisted.
“Why not count to a million right now?”
“Do you think it would take longer than counting to 100?” I asked. Sometimes I count to 100 ‘quickly’ for him.
“Yes.” He said.
“Do you think it would take “10,000” times longer?” My thinking being my kid is a genius and totally understands multiplication…
“No.” He said flatly.
If you spend time around kids you know when they’re going to dig in their heels on something. That simple evening I thought would be dedicated to ‘The Magic School Bus’ was quickly going to end up as a fight over counting to 1,000,000.
“How about I get the computer to do it? I bet the computer can do it very quickly.”
This seemed to somewhat please him. “The computer can count to a million?”
Being a millennial tech parent, of course I had my laptop within arms reach. I opened it up and entered a ruby console.
1000000.times { |number| puts number }
BOOM! Before you know it 1 million lines of numbers spit onto the console. This worked out because my kid had a chance to review the facts.
“Where is 100?” He inquired as I scrolled up and down the output. After a little number talk about what’s greater than, or less than what, he got a little bored and went back to wanting to watch ‘The Magic School Bus.’ Crisis averted.
What is the point of this story?
For one thing, I need to figure out how to flexibly entertain my kid’s innocent questions better.
Also, because I think I’m so smart there’s a parallel here to be observed about office politics. Another department can have an excellent idea… That requires you to count to a million. You want to be a good parent, err, co-worker but you also don’t completely understand the point in their effort.
Asking questions, and suggesting alternatives can save everyone a ton of trouble.
I did not understand what my kiddo wanted with me counting to 1 million. However, once he could see a million lines of numbers, that seemed to satiate his curiosity around the order numbers live… His desired objective was to understand where ‘100’ was in the pecking order of 1 million numbers.
Before a team takes on a big chunk of work clear outcomes need to be defined. Once the objectives are defined we can start to ask questions about the strategy around getting to those end goals.
Example Scenario
At one point in my career I was charged by my boss to implement a Single Sign On (SSO) solution for our suite of products. Knowing nothing about SSO the baseline objectives I had were:
– Our internal folks wanted one login for our public facing and private facing tools.
– Our customers didn’t want separate logins either. They just wanted to use the existing company login
With those objectives defined I had a ballpark to work in. I set out trying to Google my way to expertise on what it means to implement a SSO solution. When I would get stuck on whether technical option A vs option B was the better choice I could refer back to those objectives to see if one fulfilled the objectives better, worse or the same?
If stakeholders can agree on an objective then if/when you need to propose a new direction for everyone to meet those goals it should make more sense why your proposed solution makes sense for the project. Will your proposal always win? No. However, objectives written in a way that are readable cross-department ensure stake holders are on the same page and keep a project on track (hopefully).
TLDR
Being patient is a very important quality at home and in the work place. Keep cool when working with non-tech folks and build out objectives everyone can understand so proposed alternatives to how to get to those objectives won’t be seen as misguided.