Someone wants to solve X. They guess Y will get them there, hit a wall on Y, and ask you about Y. You spend the whole afternoon helping with Y. Only later do you find out Y was never going to get anyone to X.
This is called the XY problem.
The tell is a request that feels oddly specific, or oddly shaped for the goal it claims to serve. The cheapest fix is to ask what they were doing right before they needed this.
Stub
Expand with real examples from support tickets and feature requests. Pair it with The righting reflex, which is the same failure from the other side of the table: one person asks the wrong question, the other answers too fast.
Shows up in Design thinking is a way of life as the select-all request that was really a request to stop doing a job by hand.