The power in the question "Why"

Children can be inquisitive. Super inquisitive.

Everybody with kids can understand and appreciate the endless questioning. “What’s this?”, “What does that mean?”, “How does that work?”. They’re wanting to understand and learn more about the world around them and it’s only natural to ask away. In most cases, parents have all the answers.

However, every parent’s true nightmare is being caught on a long road-trip with the “why” sequence. To those that don’t know it starts innocently and follows a sequence like this:

“Do you like coffee, dad?”

“Yes, I love it!”

“Why do you love coffee?”

“Because, I love the taste and it gives me a bit more energy”

“Why do we need energy?”

“So I can do more fun things with you”

“Oh…. why do you want to do more fun things with me?”

“Because it makes you happy and I like making sure you’re happy”

“Ok… why do you want to make sure I’m happy?”

“… because… I don’t want you to be… sad…?”

“But, why?”

“…”

The all knowing and all seeing parent very quickly gets stumped. The power in the question “Why?” is quite deep and philosophical as it’s meant to get to the heart of the subject; the reasoning for it. It also makes the “Why” question a powerful tool that can be used to help us with general problem framing because it gets us to the intent, the deep root of the problem, faster. Once we get there, we can then start looking outwards for different solutions .

How does this work?

Let’s take the popular subject of being financially independent and retiring early (FIRE). The subject focuses on retiring early and the fact that being financially independent helps us to do this. Cool! But, what’s missing is the reasoning to retire early. To challenge this we can begin a direct questioning sequence to dive deep into the reason:

“Why do you want to retire early?”

For example purposes only, let’s just say the person being questioned is fixated on the feeling of freedom:

“Because I want to be free.”

You can then help the person to think (laterally) about other solutions to their problem by reframing their statement as an exploratory question:

“How else can you be free?”

You can see that there are many possible answers to this question which then starts the thought process on other solutions, of which “retiring early” is one solution to this.

In some instances there may only be one solution (rare). In this case, you can always repeat by asking “Why” again to go deeper into the reasoning again. Just like a kid! You can keep doing this until you get deep into the actual reasoning for anything.

Getting to the reason or the root of the problem helps to keep us true and sets us up for a more successful outcome as we test a solution against it. It’s very easy to provide a solution or idea for others to blindly follow, but without understanding the intent behind it, we might be following down the wrong path. By looking at a subject slightly differently, we can start thinking outside the box and be a bit more innovative with our approach. This is especially true when building companies and when creating digital products. It is quite common for a team to get stuck and focus on a solution without really understanding the reasoning for doing it (the “Why”) and if there are other ways to achieve the same outcome. Asking “Why” is a great start because it helps to focus on this reason, and then following this with a “How else”, “How might” “How can” gets the team to think about other solutions that can provide the same outcome to solve the problem.

It’s important to note that once you have been through the questioning sequence and fall on a solution that you don’t stop there and just implement the solution. Remember that the solution is still only a suggested solution, and you must test it to see how close it gets to solving the true problem.

If you’re interested in this thought process, you can read further about Toyota’s “Five Whys”and any of Edward de Bono’s books on Lateral Thinking.