User Feedback #
Sometimes a request is much less interesting than the motivation behind the request, which the requestor might not even fully understand.
Sometimes people demand a giraffe, when really, they just need a ladder, or better yet, they need things to not be up so high.
“There are ZERO giraffes in here and that makes me ANGRY! Fix it!!”
Yes, this is unreasonable. But if you don’t try to hear past it, then you’ll only see an unreasonable demand. Marking it with your judgement, it is easy to dismiss. Bozo bit is flipped, end of story.
Worse yet, if you don’t dismiss the request, you may find yourself negotiating their giraffe down to a horse, or a dog, which isn’t helpful at all! You’ll resent their need for a pet, and they’ll resent your unwillingness to provide a minion to fetch things off of high shelves.
You might perhaps never realize that you could have trivially made the ladders more easy to find, while planning renovations to lower the shelves, so that ladders would not be necessary.
You might be so distracted by the request for a large African mammal, that you never see that they didn’t want a pet in the first place.