Thought Bubble - Don't ask 'how' until you're sure about the 'why'

READ: 1 min

AUTHOR: Robert Craven

We spend too much time asking ourselves how we are going to do something. People should not be concentrating on the HOW of what they do until they have got the WHY absolutely nailed. Often we try to figure out how to do something that really isn’t necessary. Or really isn’t desperately helpful.

An example.

A client is obsessed with how they are going to deliver a faster service. The issue had been perplexing them and they had found several possible expensive solutions. It was only when we asked why do we need to deliver faster that we realised that we were trying to do it to keep one specific client happy. One client who wanted a cheap and high quality and fast service (one of the three is fine but all three is an impossibility). A client who was a pain in backside. So the how suddenly became redundant when we realised we were trying to do something that didn’t actually help the business in its single over-arching goal of only working with great and profitable clients. Problem solved.

My point

Often we try to figure out how to do something. It is as if we relish the intellectual challenge. How could we do it (4-minute mile or a marathon or hit 30%GP or whatever.) But often the how is not the question. We need to make sure we know exactly why we are doing something before we can spend too much time focusing on the how.

Another example

Stephen Covey tells the story of the person who is so obsessed with getting to the top of a ladder as quickly as possible (the why) that he forgets to make sure that the ladder is leaning against the right wall (the how). I can think of several people who have focused so much on how to get rich/famous/popular/healthy etc that they forget why they were trying to do it. And, of course, when they ‘arrive’, there is no clap of happiness.

Thought Bubble

Are you working through why you are doing something, before you focus on how to do it?