Four Scopes Of Advice

You get to deal with this a lot in engineering, and it's also notable that the level of advice people ask for is often correlated with their skill level, with the least skilled people most often asking for operational advice on up to the most skilled people most often asking for mission advice, though this largely seems to be a matter of where the frontier of skill is for them. Part of the role as a more experienced engineer is to notice when less skilled engineers are asking questions at the wrong level and gradually help them move up to the right level of advice request.

For example, I work in software, so a common question from a new engineer might be to come to me and ask me a question about how to write a code that does something concrete like detect a string matching a pattern in the larger goal of converting data from one format to another. It usually makes sense to answer their initial question ("here's a regex you could write" or "here's a fast way to match to this based on prefix"), but then usually there is more to be considered. Why do you need to match this string? Could you use a library to do this conversion instead or at least do most of the heavy lifting (tactical advice)? Why do you need to do this conversion anyway (strategic advice)? And what customer value are we trying to deliver with this code (mission)? It's not all that surprising to find that the operational question really points to a larger issue that needs to be addressed that will solve the operational question by replacing it with something entirely different. The intuition then becomes if you're having to work really hard to make something work maybe you should step back and see if you're sure you're working on the right thing.

I find people are pretty open to this line of questioning as long as you come to listen and not to judge. If you're going to ask why, even at the operational level, people are generally much more receptive to advice if you come fully open to the possibility that they are already doing the right thing and just needed confirmation. This turns the situation around to something the advice giver can do something about, namely how can you give your advice such that you can encourage the asking to consider the question at what you consider the right level while fulfilling their need for advice at the level they are asking for.

Failing to follow good strategic advice isn't even the worst failure mode here; unless you're lucky you may not be given any strategic advice at all in response to a tactical question. If nobody notices that you're committing the XY Problem, then you may be given good advice for the tactical problem you asked about, follow it, and end up worse off than you were before with respect to the strategic problem you should have been asking about instead.

Related: https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925

Alex Papadimoulis brings up an analogy to a carpenter building a shelving unit asking, “Which is best to drive nails? And old shoe or a glass bottle?” Advice at the operational level would be to compare and contrast the characteristics of shoes and glass bottles and try to determine which would be best to drive nails in this circumstance. Advice at the tactical level would be to say, “Go the hardware store and buy a hammer.” Advice at the strategic level would be to ask, “Why are you using nails here?” And finally, advice at the mission level would be, “Why are you even building a shelving unit?”

My friend adds the following addendum:

Sometimes, someone asks you for advice of level N. However, what you know, and what the one who asks you either does not know or does not want to acknowledge, is that no advice of level N will suffice, for their situation; the flaw in their approach is on level N+1.

(Example: “The wheels aren’t holding the car up; what sort of bolt should I use to ensure that they hold?” —when the problem is that the car has three wheels instead of four; no kind of bolt will fix that problem.)

Such cases are difficult. You know that no advice you give on level N will work, but no advice you give on level N+1 will be accepted.

Being open to being told that this is the case, is, I think, a critical part of being rational.

I was thinking about this the other day, and to me it seems that the problem with much advice is that words don't have intrinsic meaning. The sorts of things you say when you've had life-changing experiences often don't communicate the experiences - so apparently meaningless platitudes like 'believe in yourself' isn't that the advice-giver doesn't believe them, and isn't that they don't correspond to his internal understanding, it's just that they don't convey the right internal models to the listener. The words you say when you understand something, and the words you need to hear when you don't understand it yet, are not the same.