“Hang on, could you just rewind a little...”

When you’re developing a project there’s often a strange reluctance to go back and double check that the stuff you’re being told right now fits with the stuff you were told earlier. “Hang on, could you just rewind a little,” or “can you remind us what you said at the beginning” somehow suggests you weren’t paying proper attention or not able to keep up.

Yet this is key to development. Being able to constantly refer back and check continuity enables you to sense check the logic of the project and reveal the strengths or weaknesses of all new ideas as well as your initial goal. If people only focus on going forwards to prove that they’re getting somewhere, you’ll end up nowhere.

Asking the right questions as you go along and mapping the answers in a form that enables you to constantly refer back is the secret to really moving a project forward. It’s also the secret to what I do when I visit a team.