> Suddenly I'd get a lot of useful responses explaining why what I was doing was wrong and how to do it properly.
Editing a draft is easier than creating from scratch. If you ask an expert open ended questions, you are creating a lot of work for them. But if you take a stab and ask for feedback, that’s much easier.
I get where you're coming from, and I should have clarified in my original comment.
> If you ask an expert open ended questions, you are creating a lot of work for them.
True, but my questions were pretty direct, and black and white.
> But if you take a stab and ask for feedback, that’s much easier.
That's true in that it's showing that I'm attempting to solve a problem, etc. However, for the scenario with this team, the work involved in answering was the same before and after. These weren't open ended issues.
The questions were typically "Should I do A or B?" Eventually, with no response, I'd announce "I'm going with C" where C is clearly wrong. I always then got emails telling me which of A or B was correct.
Oh, and I didn't ask for feedback. I learned that would not elicit a response. Just a straight up "FYI, this is the plan and I've begun execution." That led to urgency in responding.
No one could complain they didn't have a heads up as I often had weeks of unanswered queries to refer them to.
As I said: Crappy thing to have to do, but this was one team where more reasonable approaches just weren't working.
Editing a draft is easier than creating from scratch. If you ask an expert open ended questions, you are creating a lot of work for them. But if you take a stab and ask for feedback, that’s much easier.