When was the last time you were faced with a question starting with 'Why'. A typical question we hear more often is "Why did you do this?" The moment we hear this question, we start by justifying. Earlier, I often fell into the trap of justifying unknowingly (Now, I fall into the trap knowingly). Sometimes I try to get away from this 'why' trap by admitting that I had made a mistake. But the tirade of 'why' continues with another question starting with 'Why' - "Why did you make a mistake?" You as an individual can do nothing because if you manage to miss one 'why' question, another is hurled at you. At some point we have no choice but to turn on our defense mechanism and start justifying. This gives a good opportunity to the person who hurled the 'why' at us to prove us wrong and bury us deep in the ground. I googled for snappy quotes on 'why' and some of the first hits asked "Why nerds are not popular?", "Why software needs a platform?" I did not make an attempt to read the contents of these pages. Most likely these pages would contain multitude of reasons justifying the 'why' hypothesis in these questions. Abandoning the search for quotes, I searched my personal experiences with this word to explain it.
One of my earlier experiences with this question 'why' was during my Ph.D. Thesis Defence. The very fact that I had to defend my thesis allows or authorizes people to ask 'why' questions on my doctoral research. Some of the frustrating 'why' questions I faced were "Why is the sample size for the survey so small? Why have you not considered expanding the research into further areas? etc. etc" Obviously, if I had answers for the above 'whys' most likely I would have faced a different set of "why's". During that time, I was not aware of the 'why' trap. But when I look back, I realize that I fell into this 'why' trap unknowingly and the people asking questions had a really good time questioning. At those times, I was wondering why people ask questions around assumptions or constraints. I built a theory around assumptions during that time. The theory is "assumptions are the most fragile items (or without any support) and it is extremely easy to attack them." Even today this theory holds good. One of the first things I do while reviewing the work of my team is to go through the assumptions and validate the same. Returning to the fate of my doctoral research, I faced the barrage of 'whys' and defended my thesis successfully .
Another experience of mine with the 'why' word happened in the recent past (2 years ago) with one of my previous managers. He wanted me to do a dry run (practice session) on a training session which I was planning to conduct. Personally, though I found it irritating (I did this program numerous times earlier), I decided to give it a go. We went through the dry run and completed the same. Then he got into a rhetoric on why we had to do this dry run and so on. This sounded more like a confession which I never asked for in the first place.
In my experience, more often these 'why' questions are a product of various socio-cultural aspects which I will explore in a different article. The 'why' question, to me, is like a post mortem exercise and is reactive in nature. Very often managers can easily nail a person with a 'why' when they know that something has gone wrong. There is a good chance that the manager has got to know about it either directly from the employee or through client escalations. In all the situations, the justifications and explanations for each 'why' were plenty and you probably can write a book for each 'why'. In all the cases the value addition to the organization or individual is close to zero.
In my experience, more often these 'why' questions are a product of various socio-cultural aspects which I will explore in a different article. The 'why' question, to me, is like a post mortem exercise and is reactive in nature. Very often managers can easily nail a person with a 'why' when they know that something has gone wrong. There is a good chance that the manager has got to know about it either directly from the employee or through client escalations. In all the situations, the justifications and explanations for each 'why' were plenty and you probably can write a book for each 'why'. In all the cases the value addition to the organization or individual is close to zero.
Another incident happened when I was working in my previous company. My team was responsible for maintaining the HR content in Intranet. The Holiday calendar for the company was one of the critical parts of HR policies. This document kept on changing because the organization was adding more and more state holidays into the holiday calendar because of rapid expansions. We kept an audit process in which each function should audit their intranet pages once a month as per the process. As usual, preventive measures were difficult to adhere to and none focused really on audit process. Eventually with so many changes, version management, one particular holiday was incorrectly stated in the intranet. Employees from the state that observed that particular holiday noticed it state and it became an issue. Finally the company had to include that holiday too in the holiday calendar. As the head of the systems team, I was at logger heads with the HR team and we went through the major 'why' process. As usual, each one of us, started justifying our position in this 'why' post mortem. Post that event, again we published the process, but in 3 months time the process was forgotten. Thankfully we moved the intranet management to a proper content management technology and hence the issue was resolved once for all. You can see, how 'why' triggers a reactionary justification process internally.
CMMI level 4 glorifies the 'why' thing by adding Root Cause Analysis as one of the requirements. Root Cause Analysis typically uses "why" question to understand what went wrong. I still support this because the intend is to use it constructively, but it can backfire if every piece of your work goes through Root Cause Analysis.
'Why' could be the reason for many scientific discoveries or accidental inventions. One of the greatest scientific discoveries, Newton's laws of gravity was an outcome of a 'why' and the accidental invention of Pencilin too was product of 'why'. But when it comes to human relationships and people management 'why' definitely triggers a reactionary defence mechanism leading to justification of the actions we have taken. This is not a desirable outcome because, the end result could be either the other person stops sharing with you any information or ends up disliking you as a person.
Following is the approach I used in my personal behaviour correction in the last three years.- Remove the word 'why' from my dictionary. As much as possible, I try to substitute 'why' with 'what'. I get reasonably desirable results. For example instead of asking a question 'why did this happen', I would ask 'what are the reasons for this event'. With mere rephrasing I get pretty solution oriented responses than when I start with 'why'. Also I have seen people approaching me more nowadays compared to during my 'why' phase.
- Second correction I made is to engage in "in process checks" instead of reacton oriented analysis. This way I do not get surprises and am on top of the things.
Of the two corrections, the first one made significant difference, because even earlier I was engaging myself in "in process checks". Post the removal of the 'why' from my professional dictionary, I could see a major difference in my people engagement skills.
Removing 'why' from the dictionary is hard initially, but we need to make a conscious effort to get there. Marshall Goldsmith, author of 'What Got you Here Won't get you There', suggests a game to remove bad and annoying habits. As a game, whenever you start a question with 'why' put a 100 rupee note in a kitty (for team party!!!). For sure.. when your pocket starts draining fast, you will stop using 'why'.
