Kathy Sierra makes a good point in a recent post.
Things I learned from my horse trainers #42: practice saying, “Hmmmm… how interesting.” Say it when you’re frustrated. Say it when you’re mad. Most importantly, say it before you say or do anything else (including hit the “send” or “post” button).
It should be the first thing out of your mouth when things go wrong–or don’t meet your expectations–because:
1) It inserts a pause and gives you a moment to think before you react.
2) It keeps you from taking things too personally
3) It helps you ask more questions instead of jump to conclusions.
This is something I have done for at least a few years now, anytime someone tells me something is broken or acting strangely, my immediate response is ‘hmmm, that’s interesting’ and sometimes I’ll even just say ‘hmmm’, which is a quick and choppy hmm, not a long drawn out hmmmmmmm. So, I guess I have a slight variation and I have never considered my motivation for saying that, however, I have been called on it.
I never realized I did this, but I wrote an application at work that is used every day to scan bar codes on thousands of pages of invoices and it is fairly stable, but things do happen. One day, they were telling me of something not working right and of course, I said ‘hmmmm, that’s interesting’ and the supervisor in that department said, ‘you always say that whenever something goes wrong’. I was caught!
Kathy nailed it though, I never even realized I did that, but ever since I was caught, I now catch myself still saying that. It is a great way to pause and buy time and that’s usually what I’m doing. There’s usually not a quick response that’s going to fix the problem, and since I don’t ever want to sound like I’m clueless, then that phrase works. It sounds better than ‘ahhhhhh, I have no clue, but thanks for sharing.’
From a troubleshooting perspective, if a program or a computer is not doing something right, in other words, it’s acting differently than normal, that means something changed. Either the user is doing something different or the hardware or software is doing something different. Call me cynical, but many times, it is the user that has done something different and causes the problem. Whether I say it or not, I normally always wonder what the user has done to cause this problem.
My motivation for saying ‘hmmmmm, that’s interesting’ has never concerned me enough to think about why I say that, but now I know.
Isn’t that interesting?