Simon Sinek is an inspirational speaker, writer and one of my favourite people (to be clear I don’t know him).

However, when it comes to service design I will (briefly) challenge Simons assertion to “Start with Why” (great book by the way).

With a career in public and military services, at the “sharp end” for the majority, I note that rarely is the “Why” missing, at least in meetings, debates and decisions making.

Many times you will hear “We need to protect ……” or “We have to help….”. The why is there ever present in decisions and projection of reasoning. In fact I would argue it is often used as the “emotional hammer” to drive home a particular change, or keep a particular service.

What is missing is the “What”.

Most managers can tell you quite clearly “Why” a service, process, policy exists and “How” (perhaps slightly less) it is implemented.

But few can tell you with rigorous clarity exactly “What” it does.

And by “What” I am defining this as a transformation process, a change of state. Best visialised as a black box:

Something enters the black box, and leaves it in a changed state, this is the “What”, what happens within the box is the “How”. Although this seems a fairly simple concept, when actual forced to describe something in this simplistic format the difficulty can be both startling and enlightening.

Note a transformation in this format presents as “Person with need for food” (input) and this need is met by “Person with need for food met” (output). The output is NOT: “Meal” or “Person given Meal”. These are both the “How” and neither confirm the intended transformation, you can have a meal and still be in need of food.

Yet rarely is this level of rigour taken within the public sector to define the what. And generally this leads to a “Tragedy of the commons” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) situation in which the service begins to sink and behave erratically, commonly seen taking extreme actions such as changing opening times, deflecting demands onto less equipped areas or asking for layers of triage to try to prevent demands.

If it can be agreed at this most simplistic format “What does this do” the next challenging question arrives, what metric or feedback mechanism do you have which tells you that you are achieving this?

This is generally quite a powerful moment as managers frantically look to all the metrics and KPI’s which have for so long been deemed to be of significant importance and one after another discover all fall within the “How” and none reveal the “What”.

How can we ask people to self organise and embed “continuous improvement” (a common term, far less commonly implemented) if they do not have clarity and measure of what they are self organising towards? Like when you used to play “hide and seek” with your parents, and were given the helping hand of “warmer…colder…a little warmer”, where is the metric that helps people self regulate towards the greater objective?

Now comes the “Why”, having defined the “What”, how can we measure its achievement, we must now ask “Why” do we do “What” we do. And now, this means something because “What” is no longer just a word in the sentence, it is a defined “thing”, an agreed purposeful action with an agreed metric of its achievement.

“Why” do we do this (What)? Now this is asking us to challenge at the next level of black box/Transformation (A black box within a wider black box). What is the wider goal that this is contributing towards? There is that word again, we return to “What”, but this time wider and encompassing other “What’s” viewed now as one systems of transformation. And in doing so our well defined “What” has become “How” in an instant. It is now “How” to the wider “What”.

This process, known as recursion, has been described as being like Russian Dolls, one inside another. This is a useful metaphor but it should be acknowledged that within each level of recursion there are likely multiple sub systems, not one stacked within another.

So the why becomes a secondary challenge as to if the action actually contributes to the wider goal. Does this voice recording actually reduced the number of calls, has the this separations of skillsets actually improved Efficiency and Effectiveness (How & What).

Following this process within the public sector you will at some point reach a level which crosses departmental and organisational boundaries, at this stage is important to ask: what co-ordination is in place between the separate systems and does this meet the dynamic needs adequately?

Having established a higher level What (by asking Why) the metric or measure which dictates the effectiveness of the higher level “What” can now cross these boundaries, and this can (leveraged in the right way) encourage self organisation across departments and organisations, in contrasts to most KPI metrics which discourage it.

So I maintain that a major influencing factor as to why “Silo Working” is often complained of yet rarely changed is due to ill defined “What”, and further yet any metric based on the achievement of “What”.

Without this we are destined to a metaphorical hamster wheel experience of chasing KPI’s (How) metrics, unable to escape due to the enforcement of “Why”, an ethical vision with no clarity as to what action is to be taken to achieve this and how this action will be measured as to its effectiveness of achieving the Why.

Simon makes a powerful and important point, to understand and sell your company starting with “Why” it exists is more powerful than “What” it does.

But, to understand how your business works you need to define firstly “What” is it doing, ask “Why” is it doing this (what is it contributing towards) and then allow the How to develop over time towards the What guided by the Why.

The world is immensely complex, even in business most decisions are best guesses, there is no clear or singular “right” answer. All we have is an opportunity to think rigorously about how we think, and then what “bets” we take towards what we hope to achieve.

“How” cannot achieve “Why” without understanding “What”.

Systems Ninja

References:

Checkland

Beer

Ison

Elliott

Kreher