Roger Johanssen (of 456 Berea Street) pointed out an excellent article by Derek Powazek called The Art of No. Read it.

The article centres around asking "Why?" instead of saying "No" when approached to implement what seems to be a ridiculous idea (to us as designers, developers etc.). I'm sure all of us have been in the same situation, the client comes to you with what seems to be a stupid request and the knee-jerk reaction is to just say no. But the better response to these requests is to ask why? As in "Oh yes? That's interesting, why do you want us to do this?" which should open the conversation to an elaboration of the problem/s they're trying to solve.

In my team (we're called Solutions), we are always trying to get clients to come to us with the problem that needs solving (not with their solution which they want us to implement) simply because we're well positioned to develop a solution that will address their needs while fitting in with all the other solutions we've developed or maintain. And this is critical when you have as large a solutions architecture as we do. To me it is equally important to get to the meat of the problem whether it's to implemet a large scale application, or as simple as an addition to a webpage. Why, indeed.

Such a simple question - such powerful results.