When I became interested in leadership, one of the first things I found online was The Golden Circle by Simon Sinek and his book Start With Why.
I discovered that I had to focus on why we are doing what we are doing. It just made total sense!
The more books I read and the conversations I had with other leaders, the more they all share this reasoning on focusing on the why and inspiring others on the mission.
I struggled a lot to learn how to articulate the why, because most of the time I didn’t know! It was so frustrating and I felt like I wasn’t prepared to be a good leader.
I want to share with you my relationship with “why” and how I think “for what” can be a good alternative for certain situations when the uncertainty is high.
⚠️ Disclaimer. Catalan and Spanish are my native languages, and this is relevant to how I think about the questions “why” and “for what” based on my culture. I am not aware if what I’m sharing in this post will be different for other cultures where their language isn’t romance.
When I was a consultant, I asked “why” a lot
As a consultant, I learned to ask “Why are we doing this?” to have great conversations and understand my client better.
I learned that the question had two main outcomes (simplifying):
The client knew the “why”.
The client didn’t know the “why”, or it wasn’t good enough because it was easy to challenge.
The first scenario was super. We understood the client, we had the relevant information to do our job. All good! Let’s continue.
The second scenario was the most common one and it had two probable outcomes:
We needed to do discovery or research before continuing because it was important to understand the why behind our decisions.
We cannot do discovery or research, and we just work with what “we are told”, and learn along the way.
I thought that scenario one made me a good consultant. I helped them realize they didn’t know and know they can understand the why. On the other hand, I thought the second scenario was that I didn’t influence them enough to make that necessary investment.
What happened is that, even with the discovery, the research, and all of that, sometimes we never got to a good enough response to the “why”, and resources and time are being consumed during that time.
Should we keep investing in understanding the “root cause” or why certain decisions are made? Could we have learned about all this context along the way? Did these learnings improve our decision-making enough to make it worth it?
I learned to work with “enough good” answers to the “why”. Ultimately, I did my job the best I could given the context and situation at hand.
After moving into a product company, and being in a leadership position, I learned the hard way how complex and difficult it is to know “why”.
The why works better when there is a story behind with enough data
When I joined Creditas as an Engineering Manager with 0 team members, I had to make a lot of decisions and reply “why” I was making certain decisions instead of others.
I was able to reply to them with enough arguments because I did similar things in the past. I referred to past experiences combined with good fundamentals and my responses seemed to convince people.
I was able to explain my experience with a storyline and enough relevant data backed up by some theory/fundamentals.
When we have already enough experience with something, replying to the “why” becomes easier.
But what happens when we don’t have a past? What happens when we lack all those experiences, facts, theory that could provide a convincing response to the why?
We move from the “certain why” to the “uncertain why”, and this one is more challangeable than the previous one. (The certain why is also challangeable, but you got my point).
Most of the time I don’t know the why, but I know the what
When the context is more uncertain, it lacks data, experience, and facts, and asking the why will result in some hypotheses, desires, and some “data” that kind of explains the why but is not enough convincing.
Asking more times why doesn’t improve the response just creates an analysis paralysis. We want to increase the certainty in a context that’s not fully possible.
Without being a language expert here, when I hear “why” I tend to look at the past for anything that could support my arguments. So, I look for past evidence that would argue the future expectations.
That’s how I think.
The more you ask me the why in an uncertain context, more harder will it be for me to reply to you, and given a point, I will either go in the direction of:
I need to do research.
Becoming “top-down” because I consider that doing research won’t pay off and we should discover and learn as we do rather than stop until we have more certainty.
I am a person who prefers the second to the first. I would rather do continuous discovery based on the information at hand rather than be in an analysis-paralysis situation.
But then I learned a new way to ask questions when the uncertainty is high which leads to a different outcome.
I started to ask “For what?”
For me, asking “for what?” helps me uncover my future expectations.
I might not be able to tell you the “why”, but I hope that telling you the “what” is good enough that we can learn the “why” along the way.
When I start answering the “for what?”, we can write down all those hypotheses and expectations that need to be true for that future to happen.
What needs to be true to make this happen?
What will this enable?
Why this over that?
For who is this for?
By thinking about the future, I can put all my expectations, hypotheses, and past experiences into why I consider this the next move.
It is way easier for me to talk about what than the why. Why should I force myself to start from the why? Maybe I should use the most appropriate starting point that will bring me to the why at some point, but the important part is to keep moving over waiting to have the best answer.
I learn my why as I do, and I usually start with what.
The next time you feel blocked, try asking five times “For what?”
Note the hypothesis, assumptions, and others that you will need to verify as you move into the future to not deviate too much from your purpose.
And you? Do you think that asking “why” forces you to think about the past, and “for what” helps you think about the future?
