A colleague of mine once said that he loved having employees just out of college on his projects because they would naively ask the most important question: “Why?”
I have come to appreciate his comment so much and add one additional question my interns and new hires ask: “What?” as in “What do you mean by…..” or “What is a …..”.
Just recently while working on a project with a financial organization we had a client discussing how they would search for firm IDs in their system. For weeks we had been assuming some pop-up box on a green-screen or some similar mechanism. Our mental model of the word “search” had limited our understanding and precluded us from asking “What do you mean by search?”; the very question one of my employees asked. As it turned out, “search” meant to look up a number in a physical book of 200 sheets of paper with their entire database printed out. Search was a process that was abhorred by the staff, slowed down the process, and cost $10,000’s a year in printing costs. Search was also solved in a very simple manner (see my blog post “It’s the simple things”). This simple question ended up saving six-figures in cost and productivity over something which had been around for years and no one had ever connected the dots and realized what the process really was.
We need to spend so much more time asking “Why?” and “What?” We should never assume we know what is unspoken. We should never gloss over the obvious. We cannot let our mental models of how organizations (should) work shield us from uncovering innovative opportunities. Too often the answers to those questions “Why” is “Well, I don’t know, I guess we’ve always done it that way.”