What Would It Take?
As someone who brings change into organizations, at some point I will usually come up against someone who will resist the change.
Sometimes this resistance is not resistance to the change itself, but because the person cannot see the path from the current world to the desired state.
The process of changing can seem so overwhelming and so perilous that it prevents people from taking even the smallest of steps.
Most times, people can only see the barriers or worse, they make assumptions on what is and isn’t possible without exploring what options are out there. They’ve become so conditioned to the their current situation that they feel that that’s “just the way it is”.
Initially, there’s probably a desire to ask “Why can’t you make this change?”.
The problem with ‘Why’ questions is that they put the person being asked the question on the defensive. They now feel that they have to justify themselves personally and will seek to find any reason not to make any progress. And as Jerry Weinberg pointed out, “People will never run out of reasons.”
And while people may have some of good reasons, that’s not really what we’re looking for. What we really want to know is, “What would it take?”. This is a much more powerful question.
I prefer questions like these because they move you forward. They allow you to get beyond why something can’t be done and start getting you into a creative/problem solving mind-set.
For example, a few months ago, I attended Agile Open Toronto and was involved in a side conversation with a colleague of mine who had recently been exploring the concept of the Lean Startup. One of the main concepts of the Lean Startup is to develop a hypothesis about your product and test it in the market as soon as possible.
My colleague had been giving us the background on the new product he had been building when it came to light that he hadn’t released anything yet. Naturally, one of the questions he was asked was, “Why not?”. This led him to defend why he hadn’t released yet.
When the question turned to “What would be the minimum feature set you need to release?”, the conversation took off. Now we had some real practical discussions on what steps needed to be taken. As a result, we discovered that many of the things he had originally thought were required for the initial launch, actually weren’t. By the end of the discussion, he had publicly committed to having his product released by a date much sooner than he had originally anticipated.
In a similar situation, I was working with a client and noticed they had set a code freeze date one month prior to when they had scheduled the release. When I pointed this out, they began to justify all the reasons why this was the way things were.
After hearing them out, I followed up with, “What would it take to release in two weeks instead of four?”.
There was silence in the room for a good minute as the question hung in the air. Eventually someone said, “I don’t know, we haven’t really looked into it.”, followed by “We should probably find that out.” from another person in the meeting. Here, simply asking why would have allowed them to maintain the status quo, asking “What would it take” spurred them into action.
There are a couple of times when asking why is appropriate.
- When seeking a sense of purpose, “Why do we do the things we do?”. See Simon Sinek’s book, Start With Why.
- When doing Root Cause Analysis using 5 Whys.
In the case of the latter, always make it explicit that you are using the technique. I once saw someone attempt to do this in a conversation without making it clear what she was doing and she only succeeded in irritating the person she was trying to help.
So next time you run into someone who has a million reasons why something can’t be done, perhaps try asking them “What would it take?”
Today’s image by permanently scatterbrained
