Suggesting a help button to somebody who does not want one

The offer and the terms are two different things

Almost nobody refuses the actual help. “No” very rarely means I would rather struggle alone, indefinitely, on principle. Said plainly like that, hardly anyone believes it.

What gets refused is what arrived alongside the help. A button is not only a way to ask for something; it is also a decision about who gets told, who set it up, who can see it, and what the person having it installed is now assumed to be. Those are terms, and they turn up whether or not anybody names them.

So the useful question is not how to get to a yes. It is which of the terms is the one being refused — because that one is usually negotiable, and the help underneath it was never the problem.

What is usually being refused

• Being watched. A device that reports to other people is a different object from one that helps its owner, even when it is the same device. If pressing it is the only thing it does, that is one thing. If it also produces a record somebody else reads, that is another, and it is fair to want to know which one is being installed.
• Being discussed. Most of these arrangements are worked out somewhere else first — a group chat, a car journey, a conversation in a kitchen while the person is in the next room. Arriving already agreed is its own message, and it is heard before anything gets switched on.
• Being made into a project. There is a difference between being helped and being managed. Once somebody is the subject of a plan with participants, ordinary requests start to feel like evidence for it.
• The category the object belongs to. Objects announce what their owner is assumed to be. Anything that looks like it belongs to illness or frailty says so to every visitor who sees it, and refusing that is not vanity — it is an accurate reading of what the thing communicates.
• A decision that looks permanent. If something appears to be irreversible, the moment it is proposed is the only remaining moment to refuse it. Quite a lot of what reads as stubbornness is somebody using the last opportunity they can see.
• Losing an argument nobody admitted to having. Turning up with it already bought converts a question into an announcement. The refusal that follows is often about the conversion rather than the object.

Rarely refused: one specific thing becoming easier to ask for.

Usually refused: being monitored, being talked about, and being handed a decision that was already made.

If the objection is one of the second list, then arguing about the first list — how simple it is, how large the buttons are, how little it costs — answers a point nobody made.

Whoever chooses the words owns the device

This is the most concrete thing on the page, and it costs nothing.

A set of labels written by the people who will answer reads as a list of the requests they are willing to receive. The same device, with labels the person chose themselves, reads as theirs. The hardware is identical. What changed is who the object is for, and everybody can feel the difference immediately even though nothing about it is stated.

It also produces better labels, for reasons that have nothing to do with ownership: people ask in their own words, and a word somebody would never say out loud is a word they will not press either. That is the whole subject of wording a button.

The awkward part is that most systems, ours included, are set up by the person receiving rather than the person pressing. That does not stop the labels being theirs. It just means somebody has to ask first, and then type what they actually heard rather than a tidier version of it.

Make stopping easy, and say so before starting

“Try it for a bit” is only a real offer if the end of it exists. Nobody names it, and so the trial quietly becomes the arrangement, which is exactly what a cautious person expected when they were asked.

Two things make the difference:

• Say what stopping looks like, in advance. Who switches it off, what happens to anything already recorded, and whether asking to stop involves a conversation with everybody. A stop that requires convincing four people is not a stop.
• Put a date on the trial. Not as a deadline to pass, but so there is a point at which somebody asks and the answer can genuinely be no. A review nobody scheduled never happens, and its absence is not neutral — it defaults to permanent.

An off switch that can only be operated by somebody else is not an off switch. It is a request form.

What tends to harden a no

Each of these is well meant, and each converts a preference into a position that now has to be defended.

• Bringing in reinforcements. Once three people are making the case, a mild reservation becomes a verdict delivered by a majority, and changing your mind afterwards means conceding to a group. Preferences soften. Positions in front of an audience do not.
• Using an incident as leverage. Whatever happened, raising it in this conversation turns it into an argument for something, and everything about that event now belongs to the case being made rather than to the person it happened to.
• The trial with no end. Covered above, and it is the one that costs the most trust, because it was offered as a small thing and turned out not to be.
• Going around them. Setting it up while somebody is out, or asking a person they will not refuse to raise it instead. Both work once.
• Answering the reason instead of the refusal. People often give the most presentable objection they have rather than the real one. Defeating that objection does not move anything, and it teaches them not to offer the real one next time.

If the answer is still no

Then it is no, and treating it as an obstacle to be worked around is how the next conversation gets harder.

What changes these situations is generally not an argument. It is a change in circumstances, and a standing offer that somebody remembers exists. Leaving it as the offer is there whenever you want it, and nothing happens until you say is a real position, and it keeps working while nobody is doing anything.

In the meantime the underlying problem — a request being expensive to make — is not waiting on any device. Answering quickly, not asking for justifications, and not making an occasion out of small requests all lower that cost immediately, and none of them need agreement from anybody. That is the subject of when someone stops asking, and it is worth reading first if the reason a button came up at all was that things had gone quiet.

What this page will not tell you

We build software for sending a short message to somebody who agreed to receive it. That is the entire extent of what we know, and these pages stay inside it.

• What to do when somebody cannot make this decision for themselves. Capacity is a legal and clinical question, it works differently in every country, and it needs proper advice rather than a page written by a software company.
• Whether a particular person needs support, or how much. That is between them and whoever assesses it, and nothing here is a way of settling it on their behalf.
• The family history underneath the disagreement, which is very often the real subject. Who has done what for whom, over how many years, is not something an arrangement will resolve.
• Anything for a situation where somebody is in danger. Nothing on this page is written for an emergency, and a button is the wrong instrument for one.