Why Do Experts Change Your Questions?

If you’ve ever been a novice asking an expert a question, you’ve experienced them changing what you asked. They might ask clarifying questions, or possibly even start answering something that seems entirely unrelated to the question you asked.

Ideally, they take you along their journey as they transform your question into the thing they will answer. But why don’t they just answer the question you’ve asked to begin with?

The expert is usually trying to give the questioner the best possible answer in the circumstances. Their expertise tells them that the question as asked has multiple possible answers. So, they transform it.

How can we ask better questions that make it easier for the other person to answer? In the next few posts, I will be exploring this theme. There are some key mental models I use for understanding why experts rewrite questions to begin with. I use that knowledge to shape how I ask novice questions.

I also do the standard consultant thing and say “it depends” a lot when I’m on the expert side.

Experts frequently rewrite questions without even acknowledging they’ve done so. The novice calls up an electrician and asks, “how much does it cost to fix a light switch?” The expert sometimes doesn’t answer the question at all and instead explains how their billing works.

Other times they do acknowledge what they’re up to. They might start with something like “It’s hard to say. If it’s just replacing a lightbulb, there’s a $75 service charge just for showing up, so you might want to check if the switch is really the problem first. Otherwise, depending on the underlying issue, it could range from a quick, inexpensive fix, to a $300 repair if, for example, the wires are damaged.”

The challenge when they do explain the rewrite is for the novice to keep up with what’s going on. If you know enough about electrical things, the description above hopefully made a lot of sense. It also included several decision points on the part of the expert:

• As an expert, you might know that most service calls for broken light switches turn out to be either a burned-out lightbulb or a mis-used 3-way switch. Do you want to take that kind of work? Or would you rather give some free advice that avoids an angry customer when you charge them $75 to replace a lightbulb?

• Are you locking yourself in to a possibly wrong price? Or is the issue clear enough that you can give a reasonable range? Go too low and you will probably lose money. Too high, and you miss out on the work.

• How much do you share with the novice asking the question? For my example with light switches and wires, maybe we can reasonably assume most people can follow what’s going on. However, when my clients ask for the entirely wrong kind of analytics, I have to decide exactly how much detail to get into at each step of the process.

Depending on the points of view of both the novice and the expert, any choice could be the wrong one. For that reason, whichever side I’m on, I try to make the goal of the question as clear as possible.

For example, as the novice, I might open with something like “I’ve tried to fix this light for half an hour including trying a working lightbulb from another socket. I’m looking for someone who can fix this in the next week or so.”

As the expert, I generally start with only the most crucial reasons I’m answering a different question than they asked. I also open the door to more digging if they’d like. For example, “Have you checked for a three-way switch or tested other lightbulbs? I don’t want to come out and have you get frustrated because you just forgot to check and I have a minimum fee of $75 for a service call.”

My recurring theme on this site is to ensure we’re always solving the best problems we can. How to answer a question is a problem just like any other, and so is which question to ask.

I’m looking forward to exploring these topics more in the coming weeks.