One day, I was playing with my daughter and she asked me to cut a square out of paper. We often grab items from recycling pile and use our creativity to craft something out of it. This particular request was not unusual. We usually glue things together to create small dolls, animals or plants. Yet, I asked her why do I need a paper square.

— Because you will need to sit on it — she answered

So it needs to be rather big and also durable. — I thought — Big square. Cardboard should do fine here.

I questioned my own assumptions. Forgot for a moment about what we usually build and what I am usually asked for. This allowed me to decide the size and material upfront, without going through failure.

I questioned my assignment. It was easy. My daughter is six.

Children at this age, when being asked a question, they don’t judge. They don’t think you are lazy and try avoid doing work. They don’t think you are questioning their authority or creativity. It is just a question. They ask questions all the time and they are being asked as frequently. Questioning is common practice. Transaction cost is near to zero.

Eventually, we get older

We exchange sandboxes for development environments. Exchange Indians and cowboys for developers and managers. Exchange recycling pile and crafting for Balsamiq and wireframes. Exchange gamemasters for Scrum Masters. You know, sort of.

We also exchange curiosity and naivety for judgement, fear and suspicion.

Bad leaders are afraid of the Why. They expect discussion to change strength of their original request. Through questioning and critique their proposition will become a tentative one, which will only be accepted if reasoning behind it is good enough. While the process of asking does not change value of the proposition, it exposes weak points. Moreover, knowing the Why allows others to come up with even greater ideas. Believe me or not, ideas change the distribution of power in the relationship.

Bad leaders are afraid of losing power.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

True leaders are team players. They share the Why and place their bets on the team success. They are curious about what team can achieve and are interested in building trust. Their What, the proposition, might become an initial seed or a backup policy, so that the worst case scenario is implementing the proposition they donated. They win when their team wins. Power shifts from leaders to teams, initially. Yet, in the long run, something interesting happens. The teams are more successful and feel free to be curious, honest and trusting. They give the power back to the leaders.

Success of both types of leaders is limited by what they, themselves, allow to happen.

Get more meaningful work accomplished

How does your organisation achieve success?

Probably a group of experienced and important people meet and discuss strategy. Let’s assume a pretty good scenario in which they understand identity of the organisation along with underlying values. They discuss and define what they want to achieve, distil it down to measurable goals. Let’s even assume the organisation was able to come up with a set of measurable KPIs related to fore mentioned goals. The teams are empowered to make decisions and some nice practices are in place (say Impact Mapping) for ensuring the goals are met. Sounds good?

I currently work in travel industry, so let me provide an example from this area. Say, CTO could ask the teams to ‘make 95% passengers register in our systems’.

Without a culture of sharing the Why, and having many creative people on board, teams could easily came up with plenty of ideas.

Provide passengers with mobile application that delivers top class user experience and they will register. Give people who work with customers easy to use, online system and they will either gather required data or make customers register. Consolidate data we have in back-end systems, and it will look like they registered. Offer some benefits, like free tour ticket lottery, and they will register.

All that ideas. Tempting. Convincing. Profitable even.

“We do the What without knowing the Why.”

― Tobias Mayer