Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire;
he breaks out against all sound judgment. Proverbs 18:1

Last week I wrote a bit about parenthood. I’ve been dwelling a lot on fatherhood and that’s forced me to take a good look at some of my weaknesses. One trend I’ve noticed is that I tend to isolate myself. I think I can get along fine without other people, but the truth is that I need people.

I think I first started to notice this at a past job. It was a tough job and I worked long hours but I couldn’t seem to get enough of it. But one by one valued co-workers left and as they left the job slowly became unbearable. The work was pretty much the same but it the team was falling apart. It was the team that drove me on to accomplish great things.

I eventually changed jobs and my enthusiasm was renewed but after a couple of years at that job once again my energy started to drain. It was really charged up back in November when I attended 2010 PASS Summit. Being around people who were excited about technology infused me with a new passion for what I was doing.

But it goes deeper than the job. I love my job but my job is not my life. I recently started attending a weekly meeting of men who are trying to be open about our problems and struggles. It was in listening to the stories they told – burdens they no longer feel able to carry, dreams that have been shattered, addictions they’ve been keeping secret – that I was able to first articulate the pains I’ve had that have driven me to do some pretty awful things: lies, betrayals, etc.

At heart I believe people are primarily creatures who need relationships. There is something in us – planted by God – that needs to connect.

My tendency is to retreat but I see now that I need to start investing in relationships. I know this will help my career but I’m hoping it will help me in all areas of life.

I’d like to leave you with a challenge. Can you list in the various areas of your life – work, personal, spiritual, etc – the people you can count on?

One of those moments of clarity came during Warren Thornthaite’s PASS Summit session on dimensional modelling. He said – and I’m paraphrasing here – don’t ask users what they want, ask them what they do.

It was in reflecting on this that I really latched on to the power of asking good questions. I had been doing this for a while but had not reflected on what it was I was doing.

Soon after starting my current job one of the BAs realized that I could be counted on to discover database problems quickly. He would often call or email vaguely defined issues like “a user says this number doesn’t seem right”. But usually I could get to the root of things quickly. Sometimes I would discover bugs. Sometimes I would discover that the number was accurate based on the inputs and the business rules. The number was just not what the user expected – or perhaps hoped.

After a certain time I spent more and  more of my time discovering things in the later category and decided that I needed to cut down on the number of false bug reports. I started asking questions of the BA. “How did the user discover the bug? What do they think the number should be and why?” And the BA quickly discovered that as he asked the users these questions many of the bugs disappeared.

There was nothing disrespectful in the way we asked these questions. We knew we could not trust that the user was always right. And we found that asking good questions was a great tool to help us cooperate with the users and help them better understand their data.

Asking good questions also seems to be helpful in all sorts of other situations, too. When I see two co-workers getting frustrated trying to communicate sometimes a good question helps alleviate the problems.

I’d like to say I’ve used this skill a lot in my personal life – with my family, as I try to grow spiritually, etc. But I have to admit this is an area I’m still working on.

I do sort of wonder why there are certain skills that come easily at work but not at home.

Anyway, what are some good questions you ask? What would you like people to ask you?