Comment by solarmist
2 years ago
The most important thing I got from this was from the original Ask post forever ago.
“Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people - ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you'll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of Everyone.”
The more diverse the people a guesser interacts with the more dysfunctional, as in not working how they intend, guess behavior becomes. If you need to interact with people who have even somewhat different values guess culture becomes unworkable.
It seems the Ask culture's norm is more favorable in welcoming new members whereas the Guess culture's norm is more favorable in building loyalties to the community among members. IMO curiosity and fear are underlying factors of the cultural differences.
An interesting thought exercise is when Ask people somehow happen to live in a Guess culture. It's like all the guess culture members are working with their own cryptography that's not allowed to the newcomer, and when the new person asks for the code, no one can clearly give the code to the newcomer. The code has to be learned by spending enough time with the community members.
Language is one such barrier -- unless you learn it at an early age, it is sometimes almost impossible to master the intricacies of a language. There are also other numerous cultural aspects that take time and effort to learn, which helps the coherence and integrity of the "guess" culture members.
But even in those Guess cultures, there are also people with curiosity and willingness to learn new cultures, which could move the cultures toward the Ask cultures. That's at least what I learned while I studied the 19th and 20th century history of Korea and Japan. They are not always successful in making changes and progresses within the society, but when they do or when the changes come, they are those thriving, by asking questions about the new world and the new norms. IMO this curiosity is the catalyst for the change from a more Guess culture toward a more Ask culture.
On the other hand, there's fear, the fear of the newcomers. IMO that's what drives the Guess culture, and also another powerful motivation that moves a culture toward more "Guess" culture. In US or European politics, you see all these nationalistic movements. As one of the comments said, even in US, the Guess culture is more predominant in the locations where the fear against other ethnic groups is dominant. It's just the correlations, but IMO there's some feedback loop between the fear and the Guess cultures.
In the end, it's easy to see why the Ask cultures would become more dominant: Ask cultures can easily talk to each other and learn from each other, while Guess cultures are exclusive even among themselves, which make them more difficult to learn from others.
Completely agree with the points about fear in guess cultures.
It goes deep too. All the way down to the fear of hearing a ‘no’ answer. So it’s self reinforcing all the way down.
Seconding this. Anecdotally, the more multicultural a space is, the more it trends towards "ask".
Unfortunately, this is not my experience. I work with many immigrant software developers, and the vast majority have not realised that they have to switch to an "ask" approach.
They will say "yes" to everything, no matter what, and then never ever ask a followup question.
For example, if assigned a task that I know they cannot possibly complete (i.e.: due to a lack of access), they'll say "yes" and then... I won't hear from them again.
A week later, the conversation will go like this:
"Have you started on the task?"
"Yes."
"How? I haven't seen you log in to the source control system, and thinking about it, I don't think you have access."
"Yes."
"So, do you have access?"
"Yes."
"How? Can you check out the source code successfully?"
"Yes."
"Can you show me what you've done."
"Umm... yes."
"That's an empty folder!"
"Yes, I don't have access, so this is all I can do."
My brother had a good tip when traveling internationally; ask questions where the correct answer is “no”. So don’t ask if the food is vegetarian, ask if there’s meat in it. Of course, that was for language barriers.
Also, I don’t know how to tell you this, but that doesn’t sound like an “ask” culture- that sounds like a “yes-man” situation.
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Through necessity.