Two approaches to fulfilling strange orders

It happens, the user orders to do for him something incomprehensible and strange. To solve such a desire of the user in two ways:

1. or help the customer to formulate his desire more concretely and more precisely, and then just put it into practice, having trusted the non-verbalized intuition of the one who asks
2. or disassemble the desire to go deeper and find out that it is a derivative of one or several other desires, one part of which usually turns out to be already fulfilled (just the customer does not know this), the second is unjustified (and this can be demonstrated to the user in the process of additional training), and the third one is more distinct and concrete, with significantly clearer rationales and tasks for the implementation of understandable additional functionality.

Being an apologist for the second approach, I once thought and realized - even though the second way is not much better, the first one should not be completely denied.

Perhaps, it is not at all necessary to understand what exactly is good for the user. If the customer has a feeling that the way he orders is really something good, in spite of the strangeness of the order it is worthwhile to start thinking about how simpler it would be to realize exactly what he wants. You can even arrange a little brainstorming. And if it turns out to be invented, then do it without further ado. It may be much easier and cheaper than to go deeper.

In this case, the user, having received the order, will either gradually realize that he was wrong, or you realize that the user has foreseen something really ingenious by his intuition.

In general, only if all the invented variants of the implementation of a customer order are obtained by something bad — resource-intensive, incomprehensible, fraught with problems, or contradictory basic approaches — then only does it become necessary to get to the user with clarifying questions and teachings.
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UPD: the post is old, the UFO was hidden for someone else's picture, now I found it in the drafts and decided to open it back, with a different picture.