Why do I have three versions of my answers?
We ask questions every day. We seek answers every day. We answer questions every day. We question answers every day? The important questions that come to mind are how do we answer questions? What does it take answer questions?How much detail should the answers have? When do i stop answering?
When we ask questions, we have an idea of what the answer we may get back. One of my lawyer friends used to say that we should only ask questions for which we know the answer to. If we were to answer our own questions, then how would our answers be.
The way I see it we should have three answers to every question. We should have
1) a high-level answer
2) a low-level answer
3) an intermediate-level answer
One tactic may be to start with a high-level answer and then narrow down to the low-level answer.
Another tactic may to provide the high-level answer if the audience is perceived as more managerial and less technical. The strategy would be to increase the level of details depending upon the increase in the perceived technical level of the audience. The higher the technical level of the audience, the lower the level ( and higher the details) of the answer. A intermediate level question can be answered using a combination of high-level and low-level answers. We need to balance our answers depending upon the audience and this skill can be developed over time.
We can stop answering when we can make a judgement call that we have communicated the answer. If the audience needs more answers, then the audience can ask more questions.
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