Today I nearly steered a teammate straight to my own answer. In a 1:1 they said they felt “stuck,” and I almost replied “stuck like you need a break?”, handing them my metaphor instead of letting them find theirs. Then I remembered clean language.
David Grove built clean language around a small set of questions designed to add as little of the asker as possible. The two workhorses: “what kind of stuck is that stuck?” and “is there anything else about that stuck?” You take the exact word the person used and hand it back, with no reinterpretation, no “so what you mean is.”
It feels almost robotic the first few times. It also works. The moment I asked “what kind of stuck?” instead of guessing, they said something I’d never have landed on: the stuck wasn’t the work, it was not knowing who to ask. My helpful guess would have steered us right past it.
The discipline is resisting the urge to translate. Every time you swap someone’s word for your own, you smuggle in your model of their problem, and your model is usually wrong in some small way that sends the conversation sideways. Keeping their language keeps the problem theirs, which is the only place the answer actually lives.
