To understand it, you must be able to explain the why.
We have an unwritten rule in our house: Never talk about the Microsoft Word vertical scroll bar.
My partner believes that the way the scroll bar in Word works is wrong. He comes from the pen and paper era and looks at the rectangle of white on the Word screen as a ‘piece of paper’. He insists that moving the scroll bar down should move the ‘paper’ down, not up, because IRL if you pull a piece of paper downwards, the whole piece of paper moves down. He thinks Word should work the same way.
I’ve used Word for a long time and I never once wondered why the scroll bar was designed this way. To explain it, I had to really think about it.
When was the last time you had to explain the why of something? A process, a procedure, a decision, a concept, a problem?
In my previous job, I wrote a lot of technical procedures. Most of my procedures were complex and had many steps — the kind that you can’t just keep in your head. My procedures had beautiful screenshots and detailed steps: do this > then this > then this > then this > and you’ll get this.
Written procedures are great, aren’t they? Got a new staff member? Point her at the procedures file. As long as Sarah can follow the steps, she can train herself in no time.
Procedures are helpful for semi-regular tasks — things that aren’t done very often — or for when Bob is away and you have to do his job and it’s been so long since you did that thing that Bob does that you can’t quite remember all the steps.
For a long time, I didn’t realise that many of my perfect procedures were missing something. Something important.
That missing puzzle piece was the why. Why do we even do this? Why do we do it in this way? Why do we do these steps in this order?
Time moves on, new team members come and old team members go and the jobs get done as they always have been done. But, therein lies the problem: After a while, no one remembers exactly why this is done like this, or even why it’s being done at all. There’s no opportunity to innovate or improve processes or reduce workloads to allow you to do more of something else. ‘This has always taken two hours, so it will always take two hours.’
If people don’t understand why something is being done, they will not question it. They’ll just follow the steps. And, you do want people to question things.
Turns out, Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Mr Einstein was a smart man. Too often we get lost in the detail of what we’re doing and forget to ask why we’re doing it and why we’re doing it in this particular way. Explaining the why makes us think deeper about this thing and question it.
Some of us are better than others at explaining the why. Often we are too close to the subject, but if the people around us get it, they can help us. Staff will be more engaged and empowered to question the status quo if they understand the why. And, we want that.
Being clear about the why opens up genuine opportunities for improvement and innovative thinking. When Sarah knows why she has to do this thing, she might see something no one else has seen. “But if we did it this way, we can cut out Step 4 altogether, save ourselves an hour’s work, and get a better result.”
Explaining the why works for more than just processes and procedures. To get better ideas and solutions and inputs from the people around you, make sure you can explain the why in a simple, easy-to-understand way. When your listeners understand, they’re more likely to come up with questions you hadn’t thought of which will broaden your perspective.
When you’re explaining the why, try to:
- Give it context. The why will tell you if you should be doing this thing at all. Is it helping or is it just adding to the noise? Is it just ‘busy work’ or does it add real value? Just because you’ve been doing it for years, doesn’t mean you should still be doing it now.
- Make it clear and concise. If you can’t explain the why in a sentence or two, you clearly don’t understand it yourself. Experiment by trying to explain this thing to your spouse, or roommate, or the barista while you’re waiting for your coffee. If they don’t get it, you need to think about it some more.
- Keep it lean. Your procedure doesn’t need to be stuffed with the why — it just needs enough to add clarity. It will help with the review process. A procedure can easily become as obsolete as a manual choke valve in a car. If Bill wrote that procedure but left three years ago, you need to understand the why before you can update it or discard it.
The simple act of speaking or writing down the why clarifies in your own mind what you are doing and can often spark that lightbulb moment, leading you to places you might never have thought to go on your own.
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Unfortunately, there will still be times when even the simplest explanation of the why won’t be enough.
Both my son and I have tried to explain the why of the Word scroll bar — it’s moving the ‘viewing area’, not the ‘paper’ — but my partner digs his heels in. “But why? It doesn’t make sense,” he whines. “It’s not logical.” And he goes on and on about it, which is why have our unwritten rule. He will never not believe that all programmers are idiots and that they need to talk to real people before they design something.
PS: Today’s three words were: laboratory, time, and choke.
