Start With Why
Three Questions to Help Business and Technology Leaders Create Focus
by Jimmy Chou
Businesses have a lot of digital distractions these days. It’s hard to miss the hype: big data, Cloud, IoT, machine learning, 3D printing and more compete for our attention. Most businesses struggle to keep up.
In fact, in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Focus on Keeping Up With Your Customers, Not Your Competitors,” the authors illustrate how individuals are evolving much faster — digitally speaking — than businesses are:
[Individuals have] redesigned their core processes in the area of procurement (online shopping), talent acquisition (marketplaces), collaboration (social networking), market research (peer reviews), finance (mobile payments) and travel (room and ride sharing).
Some companies have responded with a series of major initiatives — including customer experience (CX), digital, Agile, Big Data, DevOps and Cloud transformations — but many other organizations and their core processes have not kept pace. So how do we begin to evaluate our products and services in light of this challenge? As a business and technology leader, you must help your organization narrow the focus amid all the distractions.
The Golden Circle Creates Focus
Simon Sinek’s Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action introduces the “Golden Circle” framework to explain how great companies like Apple, Southwest and others narrow their focus. They start with their “why” to create coherent product and service experiences aligned to their purpose.
The Golden Circle has three layers:
· Why — Why do you do what you do? What’s your purpose?
· How — How do you do what you do to fulfill your purpose?
· What — What do you do? What’s your product or service?
Sinek points out that companies should start with their “why” (purpose) and infuse that into the “how” (people, process, technologies) to deliver the “what” (product or service). It seems logical, but many organizations start backwards, and instead focus on the “what” without a clear sense of the “how” — and definitely not the “why.”
But people buy why you do something. Not what you do. Not how you do it.
Starting with “why” isn’t simply about discovering your organization’s purpose. The Golden Circle is also a framework to help maintain focus on your transformation initiatives.
The Golden Circle Applied
At SingleStone, we get lots of requests from organizations looking for a redesigned website, a new mobile app, a new content management system or a new ______ (fill in the blank). Creating focus amidst all these distractions (the “whats”) is the common challenge.
These organizations could save themselves a lot of time and money by starting with a simple question: “Why?”
Let’s walk through an example of a company that’s launching a new website to accompany a new product launch. I’ll highlight a few questions our consultants ask to help clarify purpose, establish focus and drive results.
Why are you building a new digital experience?
What’s the motivation or driver for this change? What gap or opportunity in the market are you trying fill? How does a new experience fit into the broader why of the organization? Remember, customer experience is not a project: it’s your business.
You have to answer these questions to design the strategies and tactics necessary to build the integrated digital experience that wraps the new product launch. With close to 7,000 marketing automation technology vendors¹, it’s easy to get distracted by the latest and greatest. Truing back to your “why” will help you choose among them.
In fact, knowing the purpose of your initiative and how it connects to the broader “why” of your organization sets the guideposts for every decision you’ll make regarding this new digital experience.
How will you build this new digital experience?
Once you clarify the purpose of this new digital experience, you can then move to defining how you’ll deliver it. In this case, the how is a new website. But you’ll soon see that delivering a new site involves more than simply developing the site. You’ll need to design new processes for your own associates and define how different teams that support the site will be trained and interact. The “how” also transcends the web: your customers will expect a consistent experience — across channels and in person.
The how of the site, the digital experience, is just part of the overall experience you’re building to support your why. Knowing this allows you to make clear choices on how to spend your limited time and budget while pursuing your what. It’s clearly not just about the technology. The how encompasses the holistic customer experience. This is your roadmap.
What are you going to build?
With the why and the how clarified, you’re now armed with a roadmap aligned to both the why of the new site and the larger why of the organization. Then, and only then, should you start to build the experience: the what. In the end, what started as an idea for a new product has turned into a tight integration of many components of your business (design, technology, people and process) to deliver on your purpose.
There’s truth in the adage “Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.” But when you use your why to guide the how and what, the execution becomes much easier.
Do you know your why?
Jimmy Chou is the CEO of SingleStone. Jimmy is passionate about creating better ways to collaborate, improving customer experiences and driving tangible business results. He wants every client to feel more knowledgeable and confident after working with our teams.
