Ask Why. Listen to the Answer.
When you are confronted with a problem, or a situation that isn't working the way you want, your most useful next action has two steps.
When you are confronted with a problem, or a situation that isn't working the way you want, your most useful next action has two steps.
Number one: ask why.
Number two: for as long as you possibly can, try to resist the temptation to make a story out of the answer to why.
We all innately know the power of the question why. Two-year-olds learn rapidly that the words NO and WHY control their universe. Business techniques like a fishbone diagram can be very useful when you dig into a reason why something is happening. Humans are storytelling creatures. Nothing intrigues us like WHY. Nothing satisfies quite like a story.
Let's look at an example.
Say your company makes lovely artisan lamps.
A: your marketing team writes copy to describe the lamps to buyers.
B: your photo team takes detailed pictures of all the new lamps.
C: your web team integrates the copy and images to display all the lamps on your shopping site, and checks the inventory to make sure there are enough of each lamp to sell.
Week after week, there’s a scramble, as these teams are behind on their deadlines and the postings are incomplete to sell your artisan lamps.
As busy business people, we have a tendency to jump to an answer...a story...a resolution...as quickly as we can. Perfectly natural. But it is in our interests to resist that tendency and bring our curiosity to the table.
You've set a procedure. In theory, the teams have agreed to the procedure. To diagnose a problem you need to know:
are they really following the procedure?
if not, why not?
Look at the inputs, outputs, and results at each stage.
If Team B, your photographers, is telling you that Team C, your web people, just isn't following through on uploading completed photos, ask why.
If Team C started to do their part of the job, did they have all the items they needed? Were those items completed? And if not, ask Team A about their perfectly reasonable decisions that led to an incomplete item.
In all honesty, has a website listing EVER been completed in the way your procedures describe?
If you do some version of a whiteboard to track the answers to the why questions, eventually your whiteboard is going to look pretty tangled up. Good news! When it feels like you've run out of answers to the why question, only THEN is it time to step back from your whiteboard and start to look for patterns.
In fact, the more tangled it is, the faster you can get to a resolution. It's likely your staff will be impressed and empowered--feel seen, in the current trendy expression--by a visual representation of the way their workday has felt. Seeing that something is a mess gives everyone the impetus and the motivation to clean it up. Seeing the pathway to producing an end product--your Artisan lamps on the website--helps you see what the straight line to getting lamps on the website really is. It's very likely that the previous “normal” procedure can be simplified, but this time, the steps that truly are a no-go kind of blocker can be more thoroughly understood by all the teams that contribute.
Give it a try in your own business.
Better yet, give it a try with your own daily work first. When you've gotten familiar with this way of asking WHY questions, then try it with your staff. If you're tackling a bigger process and you want some outside perspective, call One Smart Thing.
Why?
Because your business runs better when you change one smart thing.
Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash