Understanding the Power and Weakness of “Why”
I have spent the last several weeks working on a vision, mission, and strategy document for the phone teams at Weave. As you might expect, it has made me deeply reflective and challenged me to see if I could identify and articulate our “why.”
In order to find some inspiration, I turned to Simon Sinek, a man who has dedicated his career to helping people and companies identify their “why.” In his TED talk Sinek talks about realizing that all great leaders and companies follow a pattern, one Sinek calls The Golden Circle. This idea is that there are 3 concentric circles that people follow when communicating. The outer one focuses on “what,” the middle is “how,” and the center is “why.” Most companies communicate what they do and how they do it (the outer 2 circles), but rarely talk about why they do it. Great leaders and companies start with their why and then use the how and what as supporting points. When we start with why, we inspire others — motivating behavior and helping them find their own reasons that align with the company’s why. If we don’t communicate this way, we are forced to use manipulation tactics like pricing or fear.
There is an undeniable power in living and communicating your why, but if that’s true, why don’t more companies do it? Sinek says that many companies lose sight of their why. I believe part of the reason for that is the difficulty we have as humans to communicate our why — whether it’s about a company’s purpose or even down to our individual choices.
I recently came across two articles that reinforce that getting to “why” isn’t an easy task.
Article #1: Tasha Eurich’s HBR article about self-awareness
My friends over at Campfire posted this interesting HBR article by Tasha Eurich about self-awareness. Being in the 95% of people that think they’re self-aware, I anxiously clicked to the article to see if I qualified to be in the elite 10–15% that actually are.
Eurich’s article covers three points of guidance on how to improve your self-awareness, two of which I want to highlight.
First, self-awareness is split into two types: internal and external. Understanding our own values, passions, aspirations, reactions, and impacts on others as well as understanding how others perceive those things within us are needed to be fully self-aware. Interestingly, Eurich’s research team found that having an understanding of just one of the two types, doesn’t make you more likely to understand the other. That means we need to actively reflect on our own behavior and motivations and ask for feedback from others in order to be self-aware.
That leads to the second point. Eurich reports that introspection doesn’t always lead to improved self-awareness. One potential reason for this is that we ask ourselves the wrong question during periods of introspection. The question we ask? “Why.”
This question tends to lead to unknowingly false answers because we don’t have access to the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives so our brain will make up an answer that feels rational even though it will be clouded in unidentified bias. We might feel confident that we have the right answer to the why question, but our brains are very capable of creating an answer that feels rational, but isn’t true. The next article illustrates this even more.
Article #2: Teresa Torres’s article “Why You Are Asking the Wrong Customer Interview Questions”
I’m a big fan of Teresa Torres, a product coach. She specializes in helping teams conduct continuous discovery by interviewing customers every week. In this article, Torres shows why asking “why” can be difficult by recounting a study conducted by Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist.
Gazzaniga already knew that the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body. And while both hemispheres of the brain are used for most things, each hemisphere specializes in different functions. In general, the left specializes in language, while the right is focused more on emotion.
Gazzaniga conducted a study with split-brain patients, or those with no connection between the left and right hemispheres of their brains. He created a booth that put a board right down the center of a participant’s face so each eye was isolated. He would then flash an image on the right side and ask participants to select a related image with their right hand. He would then do the same on the left side.
On the right side, which the left hemisphere of the brain controls, Gazzaniga showed a chicken foot. Participants then chose a chicken from the cards with their right hand. On the left side, which is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, he showed a winter scene and participants selected a shovel from the cards on the left.
Gazzaniga then asked participants why they chose the shovel. Again, remember the right hemisphere of the brain, the one that doesn’t specialize in language, selected the shovel and these participants have no connection between the two hemispheres of their brain so the left doesn’t know why the shovel was selected. However, instead of responding that they didn’t know, participants said they chose the shovel to clean out the chicken coop. The left hemisphere in their brain took the information it had — chicken foot, chicken, and shovel — and came up with a reason why the shovel fit into the narrative. Gazzaniga named this phenomenon “left brain interpreter” and it was later found that everyone has it.
Bringing it all together
Understanding and communicating our why, whether in business or personal things, is incredibly powerful, but it’s also one of the hardest questions to get right (or maybe it’s one of the easiest questions to get wrong?). How are we supposed to get to our why when we can’t trust ourselves to answer the question?
As luck would have it, Eurich, Torres, and Sinek all have a similar approach to discovering a why.
Torres encourages product managers to ask questions about what happened in the past rather than asking about generalizations or why questions. When we ask for experiences, it removes some of the bias and rationalization of why. In her article cited earlier, she talks about asking someone what they look for when buying a pair of jeans. That person might say fit. But when asked about the last pair of jeans the person bought, they mention buying something on Amazon because of a sale. Asking about two or three purchases before the last one starts to provide enough clues for us to gather what’s most important and even uncover the why.
When trying to be more self-aware during introspection, Eurich and her research team propose asking “what” instead of “why.” These types of questions encourage us to be more objective and act on the answers. For example, instead of asking “why don’t I enjoy my job anymore?,” we can ask “what situations at work drain me? What do they have in common?” Again, looking for the commonalities helps identify the patterns that reveal the why.
Even Sinek suggests evaluating the past in order to identify, or re-identify, the why. When looking at companies who have lost their why, it can be helpful to look back on the founder and what actions they took to show the reason they started the company. Similarly, we can identify our personal why by thinking about our past and finding the commonalities of the things that have driven us. Sinek even suggests asking a friend not “why are we friends?,” but rather “what specifically is it about me that I know that you’ll be there no matter what?” Digging into that question with others helps us identify our why.
I find it a little ironic that asking variations of “what,” the outer most circle in Sinek’s Golden Circle, can help us find and align to the more powerful “why.” Maybe that old saying is true: actions really do speak louder than words.
While I have crafted a “why” statement for the voice teams at Weave, I still feel like I’m in the middle of asking enough “what” questions to fully uncover the why. I’m going through a similar exercise in my personal life. Regardless, I know that identifying the why is only the beginning of the journey. Learning how to live and communicate that why is where the real fun starts.
