Questions are a trap.
Questions come embedded with assumptions and once you accept the question, you accept the assumptions.
The famous version of this is “Have you stopped beating your wife?” There’s no way to answer this question without implicating yourself.
But all questions include subtler versions of this phenomenon. “When will this feature ship?” sounds like a reasonable question, but assumes that “this” is the right feature to ship (what if this is no longer relevant or something else is more important?) and that we can estimate when it will ship (depends on how many people we can put on it, and what other urgent tasks will come up during the development process).
In school, we are taught to answer the question as given because the teacher is an authority evaluating our answers. But in our careers, we don’t have to answer questions as given.
One of the teachers of my master’s degree hosted a panel where he asked three guests (a director, a VP and a CEO) to answer a set of questions he provided. Afterwards, he pointed out that the director had answered the specific questions asked, the VP had taken the theme of the questions and shared his thoughts, and the CEO had ignored the questions entirely to talk about what he wanted to talk about. It was a perfect illustration of their relationship to authority – the director deferred, the VP acknowledged, and the CEO took charge.
Next time you are asked a question, which approach will you choose?
P.S. I was reminded of that panel story when I was talking to a client about interviewing for a job, and asking them what image they wanted to project when answering questions: the person deferring or the person taking charge?