Why Not.

“You see things; and you say ‘Why’. But I dream things that never were and say; ‘Why not?’” — George Bernard Shaw

The way I see it, we all need to be asking “Why not?” a whole lot more than we ask “Why?”. “Why not?” leads to more questions, it leads to creative thinking and solutions, it leads to learning and to growth. Try it out! I’ll bet that you are more satisfied with any answer you’ll get to a “why” than you will with a response to a “why not”.

Say you sit on a conference committee and you want to record the keynote speaker so that delegates can take it with them at the end of the conference. Someone will pipe up and ask ‘why?’. Rather than justifying the reasoning you thought was pretty clear in the first place, you respond with ‘why not?’. And here is where the conversation begins. Because it’s too expensive. Because it requires more staff. Because distribution will take too long, etc., etc. Now you’ve got something to work with. Now you know that your solution will have to be time and cost effective and the staff required to run the recording may need to serve another purpose during the conference as well.

Surely there are thousands of examples of this, and maybe this isn’t the best one to have used. My hope is to challenge myself and others into action rather than justification.

SM.