A few well chosen questions can turn an ambiguous assignment into a more useful agreement about the work
By Arbab Naseebullah Kasi, Chief Executive Officer - CEO, Feel Worldwide Foundation Inc.
Two colleagues make time to clarify a piece of work before beginning.
“Could you put something together for the meeting?”
It is an ordinary request. It can also send two people in different directions without either noticing. One imagines a brief comparison to support a decision. The other begins assembling a presentation about everything the team has accomplished.
Both may work sincerely towards what they think was agreed. The misunderstanding becomes visible only when the document arrives and someone says that it was not quite what they needed.
A useful professional skill is learning to identify that uncertainty while the work is still easy to shape. The aim is to ask enough to understand the assignment, without turning every small request into a lengthy planning exercise. Good clarification helps you begin with a direction you can explain and assumptions you can check.
Clarity cannot be taken for granted
The feeling that expectations are unclear is not confined to people starting their first job. In a July 21, 2026 report, Gallup said that 49 percent of U.S. employees strongly agreed in the first half of 2026 that they knew what was expected of them at work. That was up from 47 percent in 2025. The finding concerns employees' reported agreement with a broad workplace statement. It does not mean the remaining 51 percent understood nothing about their jobs, nor does it measure how often a particular assignment was misunderstood. Gallup's original report provides the context.
For an individual assignment, the practical question is what remains uncertain enough to change the work. A missing font preference may be easy to resolve later. Not knowing who will use the document or what decision it supports may affect every page.
Managers share responsibility for making expectations understandable. An employee should not have to reconstruct a hidden brief through guesswork. Equally, the person doing the work can help by identifying the specific question that needs an answer.
Find the purpose behind the requested format
A request often arrives as the name of a thing: a report, a spreadsheet, a presentation or a summary. That tells you something about the output, but relatively little about what it needs to accomplish.
Ask how it will be used. Is the report intended to explain a problem, compare options or record a decision already made? Will the reader need detailed evidence or a short recommendation with sources available separately?
Consider an illustrative assignment to prepare a briefing on two possible venues. If the team needs to choose a venue, the briefing should make the relevant differences easy to compare. If the choice has already been made and the purpose is to prepare staff for arrival, a comparison would be wasted effort. The same phrase, “venue briefing,” can conceal both needs.
This is a hypothetical example, not a story about a particular organisation. It shows why a purpose question is often more useful than immediately discussing page count. “What should people be able to decide or do after reading this?” creates a place to begin.
You can offer an interpretation rather than presenting a completely open question. “I understand this is to help us choose between the two venues. Is that the decision you need it to support?” gives the requester something concrete to confirm or correct.
Identify the person who will use the result
An internal colleague may understand abbreviations that a new partner will not. A senior decision maker may need a concise comparison, while the person implementing the decision needs the operational details. Knowing the audience helps determine what must be explained and what can be assumed.
The GOV.UK Service Manual's guidance on user stories, originally published in 2016, provides a public example of making purpose explicit. It asks service teams to identify the person using a service, what they need to do and why. It also describes acceptance criteria as outcomes used to check whether the need has been met. This is guidance for digital-service teams, not experimental proof that its format improves every workplace assignment.
The useful principle can be adapted without adopting all the terminology. Identify the intended user of your work and the action it should support. If there are several audiences with different needs, ask which one takes priority for this version.
Do not assume that a document will remain internal simply because the initial request came from a colleague. Confirm whether it may be shared outside the team before including confidential information, unapproved claims or details that were supplied for another purpose.
Make completion observable
Words such as comprehensive, polished and useful express understandable hopes. They are difficult to apply consistently unless people discuss what they mean for the particular assignment.
Ask what must be present for the work to be ready. In the illustrative venue briefing, that could mean current availability, relevant capacity, access arrangements and the basis for quoted costs. The appropriate details depend on the real decision, not on this example.
NASA's technical requirements guidance offers a more formal public example. It recommends capturing the reason behind a requirement and stating requirements so they can be verified after implementation. It also checks whether requirements are feasible and whether they satisfy stakeholders. This belongs to systems engineering; an ordinary office task does not need to reproduce NASA's documentation process. The relevant idea is that people should be able to tell whether an agreed need has been met.
For everyday work, a short description may be enough. A comparison is ready when the agreed options have been checked against the agreed considerations, uncertainties are visible and the reader can find the evidence. That is more helpful than discovering at the end that “ready” meant something different to each person.
Leave room for judgment. Not every quality can be reduced to a count, and a list of requirements cannot guarantee a thoughtful result. It can, however, make essential expectations easier to discuss.
Clarify the deadline and the stage of work
“Friday” can mean a draft for comments, a finished document ready to circulate or the day someone needs to use it. Those are different deadlines. Clarify the time and time zone when relevant, and ask whether review must happen before the final version is needed.
A useful question is, “Do you need a review draft then, or the version you will share?” If other people must approve the content, their availability affects the plan. Completing your part just before a meeting may leave no opportunity for the necessary checks.
Also establish what can reasonably fit within the time available. If the full request cannot be completed responsibly, explain the tradeoff early. You might be able to provide a sourced comparison of two options by the deadline, while a broader investigation needs more time.
Present that choice clearly without promising what you cannot deliver. Urgency makes shared priorities more important. It does not make evidence, permissions or other people's working hours disappear.
Bring what you already know to the conversation
Clarification should not transfer all thinking back to the requester. Read the available brief, inspect the supplied materials and check whether the answer is already documented. Then ask about the remaining gap.
Instead of “What do you want me to do?” try an accurate summary of what you understand, followed by the point that would change your approach. For example: “I can compare the two venues using the information supplied. Should the recommendation prioritise accessibility or the lowest total cost if those point to different choices?” This is illustrative wording, not a recommendation about any actual venues.
Be careful with false choices. If both conditions are essential, neither should be sacrificed merely because a question presented them as alternatives. The purpose is to reveal priorities and constraints, including those that are non-negotiable.
Group related questions when possible. A compact message containing the few decisions that affect your next step is often easier to answer than a stream of disconnected requests. But do not hold a critical question for days while trying to make the list perfect.
Separate safe assumptions from decisions that need an answer
You will rarely begin with complete information. Some uncertainties can be handled through a reasonable provisional choice. Others should stop a particular action until the right person decides.
For an internal working draft, choosing an ordinary readable layout may be reversible. Publishing a statement, committing money or disclosing private information has different consequences. Do not treat silence as permission for those actions.
Where an assumption is appropriate, label it. You might say that the draft currently covers the two options named in the brief and that additional options have not been researched. That is better than letting a reader mistake a limited comparison for an exhaustive search.
Continue useful independent work while an essential question is pending. Gather the approved sources, organise known facts or prepare the parts that do not depend on the answer. Make the dependency visible, so the requester understands what is waiting and why.
This is especially important when several people contribute. An unanswered question should not disappear inside one person's private notes while everyone else assumes the work is moving forward.
Use an early example to check direction
Sometimes people recognise what they need more easily when they can see a small sample. A short outline, one comparison row or the opening paragraph can expose a mismatch before an entire document is built.
Choose the sample to test the most important uncertainty. If the question is whether the structure supports the decision, decorative formatting will reveal little. If the audience needs plain explanations, a sample paragraph may be more informative than a list of headings.
Agree on what the early check is for and when it is useful. Avoid creating an approval ritual around every sentence. The goal is to resolve a significant uncertainty, then give the person doing the work enough room to complete it.
After the discussion, record the main agreement briefly. Include the purpose, expected output, important limits, timing and any open question. If you are summarising a proposed plan rather than a confirmed one, say so. A written recap should preserve what was actually agreed, not quietly add new commitments.
Return to the brief when the task changes
New information may change the assignment. A different audience, an unavailable source or a revised deadline can make the original plan unsuitable. Raise the effect rather than simply absorbing the change and hoping the original promise remains possible.
The conversation can remain practical: explain what changed, which part of the work it affects and what decision would let you proceed. When the requester selects a new priority, update the working agreement so that an old version does not continue guiding the team.
Clear questions do not remove all uncertainty from work. They make important uncertainty easier to see and handle. You still need skill, judgment and care in producing the result, but you have a better account of what that effort is meant to achieve.
Before your next ambiguous assignment gathers momentum, what is the one question whose answer would most change how you begin?
