Hey Sam, do you ever have the problem at work with people asking for something that's highly improbable if not impossible? I'm struggling to work out how to explain to people who aren't prospect researchers why what (or who) they're looking for doesn't exist beyond just saying that it doesn't (I've always struggled with 'show your working' thb)
I've been pretty lucky in that I've tended to work with people who are either very open-ended about their needs ("Is it possible to do something like X? How would you manage it?") or know so little about what I do that they rarely ask for anything. :D
Towards the end of my last job, when things were really bad, we were starting to get a lot of that, and a lot of it was like "Hey do this impossible thing" coupled with "There's not a really good reason to do this, we just think we should". Straight-out asking for something impossible, instead of asking if an impossible thing is possible to do, is a real red flag in a boss or manager.
So I don't have a ton of tools for it, but what helps me the most in navigating it is to act as if they have "asked if it's possible" rather than "asking for it." So if someone says "We need you to pull the entire database and find five people who will give us five million dollars each," rather than saying "Well that's not possible" or "That's a real waste of time," I say, "Let me think about how that might work. What's the goal in doing that? There may be an easier way to get that done if I have more context." Also providing people with information helps -- like "Look, if I work on nothing but this for a couple of months, that might be doable, but you can't really afford to have me do nothing but this for five months. Let's talk about what I can get you instead."
So like -- "You have to find us an Oprah" (a common request, meaning someone in our database who already likes us and can both give us a lot of money and also a lot of exposure). I can say, well, you know, having worked in this database, if we could find her we would have already. If she's in the database, the information isn't there that would allow us to find her, so we're going to have to approach this differently. Why do you need an Oprah? What will she be funding?
Often when people ask for something impossible, it's because they are bad at verbalizing what it is they really want. Usually they want something possible but they don't understand, because they don't have our training, that the way in which they want to get it isn't good, or that they need to give us more information.
So yeah -- I think the best tool is "I'm going to need to think about how we might accomplish this. Let's talk more about why you want it." And from there it can often be easier to manage expectations, because they're not giving you a flat "Give me X" and you're not giving them a flat "X doesn't exist." But it can be a very delicate dance! I wish you luck with it.
