If you’re stuck trying to find ways to achieve a goal or solve a problem, there’s a quick analysis tool that can put you back in perspective and save you hours of frustrated brainstorming. It’s as effective as it’s simple: all it takes is asking ‘why’…
Finding Your Motivation
Behind every goal you set or every problem you’re working on there’s a motivation. Even though the reasons we’re doing something are usually clear, next time you’re brainstorming solutions for a challenge you’re facing, take a few seconds and deliberately ask yourself:
“Why do I want this?”
Knowing your motivation is the most fundamental step before taking any action; after all, if you don’t know the reason for doing something, why do it in the first place? While this may seem blatantly obvious, the truth is that we often don’t consciously clarify the reasons for our actions beforehand.
Suppose you have the goal “Get more customers to my business”:
—“Why do I want to get more customers to my business?”
—”To increase sales” you may say.
Don’t try to be particularly clever about your answer: just give the first and most evident reason. While you may regard “to increase sales” as the most obvious of the possible answers, consciously bringing it to light accomplishes a lot: it gives you a fresh new perspective about your challenge.
That simple answer gives you an entire new dimension of brainstorming possibilities: if what you really want to accomplish is increasing sales, you don’t necessarily need to get more customers — What about making bigger sales each time? What about making your customers return more often?
Focusing too narrowly on a goal or problem without understanding your underlying motivations prevents you from coming up with many creative and effective solutions.
Motivation Comes in Layers
You can extract full benefit from this technique by realizing that your motivations are layered: each motivation is a way to fulfill a higher-level one. To find out upper levels of motivation, all you need is to keep asking ‘why’. In our example, the exercise could unfold like this:
—”Why do I want to get more customers to my business?”
—”To increase sales.”
—”Why do I want to increase sales?”
—”To expand my profits.”
—”Why do I want to increase my profits?”
—”To retire earlier.”
—”Why do I want to retire earlier?”
—”To spend more time with my family.”
Working the motivation ladder in this manner is a great way to find the perspective you’re more comfortable working with. You may be paralyzed about “getting more customers”, but brainstorming ways to “spend more time with family” may be much more appealing to you.
The trick is to find the motivation layer that resonates better with you and then work from there. When you purposefully think in terms of motivations, problems become multidimensional: you can always choose more effective approaches to get unstuck immediately.
More surprisingly, each level of motivation can bring you new insights that may drastically change the direction you approach your goal. In the example above, consider the high-level motivation “to spend more time with my family”: blindly tackling your lower-level motivation of “getting more customers to my business” may force you to spend even more hours at the office — which is the exact opposite of what you really want, isn’t it?
5 Main Benefits of Asking Why
There are many more reasons why considering your motivations can make all the difference in a brainstorming session. Here are just a few:
1. Multiplying your Creative Output
If you were stuck with only one goal to go after, now you have many more to choose from: that means that if you could accomplish it in a hundred different ways, now you can do it in five hundred ways or even more.
2. Bringing a Sense of Purpose
Even if you end up choosing the original challenge you had at hand, you’ll now work on it with a clearer purpose in your mind. This may give you just that extra enthusiasm boost that you need.
3. Spotting Misalignments
Just like in the example of discovering that ‘getting more customers’ really meant ’spending more time with family’, you may find that a lower-level goal is misaligned or conflicting with a higher-level motivation. In this case, simply drop your lower-level goal and approach your objective from a higher-level one instead.
4. Finding broader solutions
Brainstorming at higher levels of abstraction can give you solutions that encompass multiple areas of your life and address many issues in a single blow.
5. Uncovering Personal Values and Mission
If you keep climbing the ‘why ladder’ as high as you can, you’ll notice that soon enough you’ll inescapably uncover your core personal values — and ultimately your life mission. This is an extremely simple and practical “bottom-up” approach to understanding what really matters to you.
It’s a Habit
We’re so used to just spitting out solutions to problems that, more often than not, we just get into auto-pilot mode — forgetting to connect with our underlying motivations. But asking ‘why’ is nothing more than a habit. In fact, it’s so simple and effective that all you need to do is to just get started.
Value analysis anyone?
Buddy! This is one of the most important techniques that we use on a decision making process. Asking why to and for everything is the best way to get the better approaches to the answers that we´re looking for. In quality and environmental management we use the so-called 5W2H technique in the brainstorming sessions, that means What, Why, Who, Where, When, How and How much. Congrats!
Great, i realized WHY helps me to find myself, thanks
Good article, Luciano.
We are, each and every one of us, creatures of habit. As much as we would like to think of oureslves as free-thinking and open-minded members of a higher life form, we still are very much in a mode of instinctual animal behaviour in most situations — we just have more complicated sounding instincts now, like “career”, and “job security” and “spending power”.
Asking “why” is generally the last thing we think of, which is why it is the first thing we should be thinking of. Most people only ask “why” when it is part of a complaint about why someone else is asking all these ridiculous questions!
The best answer is always the simplest, for a question like that: “Why not?”
Thanks all for the feedback.
Fier: I had never heard about Value Analysis before — it seems like a robust idea (if readers are interested, check out this page: Value Analysis). Thanks for the idea, I’ll definitely investigate it!
Giuliano: I enjoy 5W2H, too. Quality Control is a field that has many, many ideas that can be applied in our personal lives: this very article is somewhat based on the known “Root Cause Analysis” concept. QC literature is sometimes too formal, and I believe it’s valuable to translate its concepts into a more approachable format.
Samir: I wholeheartedly agree with your comment — thanks for sharing your insights!
I love this, Luciano! Asking why when it comes to any resource you have just makes you a better steward of it, be it time, money, etc. David Bach talks about this a bit in his Smart Couples Finish Rich book. Okay, so you want to be a millionaire – why? What dreams would it help you fulfill? How will it better the things you care about most in life?
At work I’ve been walking people through a series of exercises. First, list the five or seven things they value most in life (mine, for example, are my faith, my wife, my extended family and friends, my health, and my work). Then (in a seemingly unrelated exercise), do time tracking for at least a few days to see how you spend your time during the week. Then the a-ha moment – put the two next to each other and compare how you spend the 24 hours of your day to the list of things you yourself just said were the most important in your life. For example, the average American (according to the US Census Bureau and AC Nielsen) watches over four hours of television a day, but I bet “spend a sixth of my life watching TV” isn’t on many “Top five things I value most in life” lists.
Asking why is one of the essentials in life. As my four year old nephew reminds me, it’s why we’re so good at it at a young age.
Iain: Thanks for your great comment!
Your example of “becoming a millionaire” is a perfect one. In fact, too many people have similar goals without understanding their underlying motivations.
Regarding the “time audit” you mention, it’s a great way to compare if your “top down” view of values and goals match with your “bottom up” reality of everyday actions.
I did this exercise once and it was a great wake-up call, as the mismatch was huge. Thanks for reminding of it! I will certainly do it again and blog about it — this is a great exercise that everybody can benefit from!
asking “why?” with an open and curious mind (rather than the querulous “why me?” type of why) is an absolutely wonderful thing to do. and in my experience, one of the reasons why this works so well is because it makes us
stop
and
reflect
It’s nice to be reminded of the underlying reasons for doing something that come forth from asking ‘Why?’ I spend so much time focused on the how and what that I often lose perspective on my original reasons.
Asking ‘Why?’ in response to disappointment can send a person into perplexing self-analysis if the cause and effect is not clear. Thankfully, with your recommendations and method, you ask ‘Why?’ as a basis for connecting with purpose and that is a great idea.
Man, this is sooo disappointing. How can someone write about the habit of asking “why” and not even mention the Toyota Method?
http://u.nu/9kne (it’s a link to Google Books)