Scott Berkun is one of my favorite blog writers I’ve encountered. Today he provided me with a couple of quotes that are extremely relevant to my workplace.

We get so used to trying to dispatch questions quickly (and ideas often ride the backs of good questions) we forget the most important part of a question – the part where you stop and think before you answer.

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I used to respect people who were masters of the quick answer. But as I get older it seems the masters of quick answers are often just masters of facts. Trivia. Other people’s theories. Now I think when it comes to matters of importance, these are people to fear. I agree there is definitely a time for fast thinking, but when I look around it seems slow thinking is the path to many of the things we claim we want.

Often, in my workplace, a question is asked, a quick response is given, and because, presumably, the answer was so quickly given it accumulates nods of approval within seconds. This is exacerbated when the quick response includes the latest industry buzzwords or some obscure technology that is arguably better suited to a lab environment. But since the response included these things, most of which folks truly don’t understand past the marketing release, it must be a good idea. I can imagine the question some of these people are asking themselves before beginning their nod and approve process. “Well, he knows how *technology j* works better than I do so it must be a really good solution, I guess?”

I’ve been in my field long enough now, 16 years and a few months, to be able to acknowledge that at least half of my snap reactions to design questions have been wrong in my career. I’d be willing to place a bet that 99.9% of my reactions ended up achieving the goal at hand, but upon looking back there was surely a simpler, more scalable approach to the question. I believe that is the crutch that quick answers lean on. Something might work. It might get things from point A to point B. But it also might be the equivalent of taking a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles that connects in Dallas. Sure you get there, but was it really the best, the right, way?