We had the joy of keeping our two grandsons overnight during the Christmas break. One of our activities was working puzzles. Our 4-year old grandson was quite adept at the 60-piece puzzle we had, but we didn’t have anything age appropriate for the 2-year old. Nevertheless, he told us, “I do puzzle.” So I dutifully removed another 60-piece puzzle from the box, intending to give him lots of help. It turned out that he had different ideas. For him, “I do puzzle” simply meant taking the lid off the box and putting it back on.

You may not be working with toddlers, but this story has applications for every leader. It is a vivid reminder of how something can be crystal clear to two people and yet have completely different meanings. For example:

• A leadership team may agree that new initiatives are needed to help a church reach young adults. One leader thinks this is a green light for widespread changes in worship and other ministries. Another leader’s understanding is that the church will spend more money on a marketing campaign to attract young adults to existing ministry offerings.
• A missions committee discusses the benefits of developing partnerships with local ministries in which church members can be directly involved. At the next meeting, one of the committee members asks how quickly they can shift their funding away from international missions. His question is met with confusion and anger from people who never intended to “shortchange our long-standing commitments.”
• An associate pastor says she would be more productive if she had administrative help, and the senior pastor mentions his administrative assistant can provide some support. But he is shocked when the admin is overloaded with tasks from the associate .

Each of these situations, and countless others, could be avoided by asking rather than assuming.  The individuals in these stories assumed that “everyone” knows reaching young adults requires significant programming changes or that money needs to follow mission priorities. But rather than assuming, we’d be better off asking, “What does this mean to you?” What does an emphasis on reaching young adults mean to you? What does focusing on local hands-on mission partnerships mean to you? What does “some” administrative support mean to you?

We’d also be better off sharing what it means to us, not to insist that our interpretation is right, but to simply dispel incorrect assumptions that others might be making. I thought “I do puzzle” was universally understood to mean putting all 60 pieces together correctly. It turns out I was wrong. What puzzles might you solve with a simple question and some additional explanations?