The Four Missteps of Bad Advice
People suck at giving advice. Even when they really, desperately want to help you because you’re their child and you’re about to wear socks with sandals, the advice you’ll get will be something like, “Ew, just don’t,” rather than real advice. Instead of shutting them out of your room and ruining your relationship, making the most of their good (yet misguided) advice can save you a lot of headaches when people make excuses to avoid you.
Advice follows the SPIN pattern popularized by Neil Rackham. Good advice identifies your Situation, assesses your Problem, extrapolates an Implication, and solves your Need. Bad advice, well… you can identify it because it makes you ask, “what am I supposed to do with that?”
Most people TRIP over themselves when they give advice; and, actually, they aren’t giving you advice at all — they’re talking about themselves. But if you know which step they go wrong at, you can learn from anyone no matter how they present themselves.
Here are the four missteps that advice-givers can take.
Transform the Situation
I had lunch with a friend last month and during our lunch they told me a story from the TV show Band of Brothers because they thought it was good advice. In it, there was a young, newly promoted officer who badmouthed his superiors. His criticisms were probably right, seeing as this was World War II, but when it came time to give orders to his own men he had a much harder time being taken seriously. Criticising his superiors had undermined his own authority.
Now, I’m not in the military and I don’t have men to give orders to. So when I asked what I had done to elicit this advice, I found out that it wasn’t something that I had been doing, it was just something that I should be aware of in the future and be more like its opposite. I wasn’t exactly sure what my next steps with that advice were, even if I enjoyed the story, but I resolved to remember it.
When this happens, someone is Transforming your situation into another one that they have more experience with. Advice that aborts at this stage is an attempt to build rapport rather than to inform behaviour.
If you can’t see what you’re supposed to do with the advice you’ve been given, chances are that your situation has been transformed into a different one. Good advice should be actionable, and it should be actionable because you’re already in the right place to take advantage of it.
How can you be sure if the advice applies to your situation? Ask the advice-giver what they saw that prompted them to give you this advice. If they’ve got useful observations, maybe they’ve seen something you didn’t. If they don’t, ask them what the signs of that situation are so that you can look out for it in the future.
Making the best of a transformed situation requires asking questions to connect your situation to the one the advice-giver has in mind.
Relate the Problem
I don’t play StarCraft very often, but when I do I’m not the most interesting man in the world. Obviously, I’m not very good, and combats would often go poorly for me. I must be doing something wrong, because one of my friends would regularly yell, “Micro! Micro! Micro!” over my shoulder.
He was referring to telling your units how to move and when to attack, but even that simple description was more than either of us knew about how to describe what it meant to “micro” and actually perform the necessary actions. Although he was right and that was something I needed to do, he had no idea what he meant and couldn’t connect the bigger problem to the immediate problem I was having and the next step I needed.
When this happens, someone is Relating your problem to their experience rather than to yours. Advice that aborts at this stage is an attempt to communicate expertise.
What do you do about it? You pick out the parts of the problem that are similar to a problem you have. You might have to dig for details or redirect their answers towards your problem and away from theirs, but if they have experience that relates to your own problem you can pick up some tips. If they don’t, try not to make them feel bad for wanting to be an expert without having the necessary expertise.
Making the best of a related or nebulous problem requires assessing what the parts of that problem are and whether any of the parts are similar to your own problem.
Impute the Implication
Last month I was walking down the street with my daughter on my chest in a carrier. It was winter in Canada and pretty cold. We weren’t going to be outside for much more than five minutes, so, while my daughter was bundled up and had a hoodie, she wasn’t wearing a hat because she hates them with a meltdown-style passion.
Then we were seen by a drive-by mother. An older woman walked past us and yelled, “Put a hat on the baby!” Then, thankfully, she kept walking.
She saw our situation and our problem of keeping the baby warm, but then she implied that the baby was cold without knowing whether that was true or not.
When advice goes wrong at this step, someone is Imputing that what they’ve seen happen before will happen to you now. Advice that aborts at this stage is an attempt to correct behaviour.
This may be the most dangerous stage for advice to go wrong at because the advice-giver is trying to correct something they see in you. They should be handled with finesse. Disagreeing with the implication itself won’t help, because that would be directly contradicting a belief they hold without doing the work to convince them otherwise.
So what do you do about it? Ask them what signs of their implication they see. If they think you might sunburn, ask them what the early signs of sunburn are. Ask them what puts you at risk of burning. Ask what you need to convince yourself that this implication does or doesn’t apply to you. In my case of drive-by advice, I made sure my daughter wasn’t cold and kept walking.
Making the best of an imputed implication requires determining if the path you’re on is the path the advice-giver thinks you’re on.
Project the Need
I once got targeted in a mall by a salesperson visiting from Italy at one of those “Dead Sea Sea Salts” stalls. The kind of freestanding stall that only sells one product at a huge markup. I think she had something to prove because she tried a few different tactics to convince me of my need, such as getting me to wash my hands with the salts and observe how murky the water was afterwards.
I had some pretty severe eczema at the time and she tactfully centered her argument around solving that problem without drawing too much attention to it. But although the implication that I wanted that problem solved was correct, I couldn’t see how these salts in particular were going to help. Eventually it became clear that these salts were just salt and any salt would do just as well — and that no salt would solve my problem.
When advice fails at this stage, someone is Projecting your need onto their own values rather than onto yours. Advice that aborts at this stage is an attempt to convince you of something.
What do you do about it? First, you should see if they might be right. If they paid enough attention to your situation, your problem, and what that problem leads to, they might have something worth saying. At the very least, it’s worth having a deeper chat and getting them to connect the dots between where you last agreed with them and the conclusions they reached.
If they aren’t right, then knowing where they went wrong gives you the authority to decline their advice. And if they know even a little bit of what you need, you might discover a new solution.
Making the best of a projected need requires evaluating the usefulness and applicability of the proposed solution.
TL;DR
“Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.”
- Gildor Inglorion, The Fellowship of the Ring
If you receive advice you don’t know what to do with, try the following:
- Transform the Situation back to your own by asking, “What did you see in me?”
- Relate the Problem back to your own by asking, “Where is that hindering me?”
- Impute the Implication back to yourself by asking, “How will that affect me?”
- Project the Need back to your own by asking, “Why do I need that?”
SPIN advice positively, don’t TRIP over the fact that it’s not perfectly appropriate to your experience.
