Why Are You Doing This?

It's very exciting to start a new project. Maybe you hear about something, or maybe an idea comes to you out of nowhere. It's a great feeling, isn't it? You get all excited, you discuss it with others, you start making plans or finding the resources to do it. Maybe you look for partnerships outside your organization, or you build a team to run with it from inside your firm. You present the idea formally and look for support from your peers and leadership.

And then someone finally asks the question: why are you doing this?

And you don't have an answer.

Well, maybe you have an answer, but it's not a good one. Like saying "because we can," which isn't really a reason for doing things, especially when you're investing time and resources that could be spent on other things.

I saw this happen recently with a colleague from my division, which does strategic planning for a large bureaucratic organization. For the last 3 months he's been running around with an idea for using Web 2.0 concepts in connection with our work, but he's never really been able to explain why. The ultimate purpose of the idea has changed...it started out in support of our primary analytical function but at times it seems to be a strategic communication tool. He can't describe the final form he envisions for it and so he can't explain how to get from here to there because he doesn't know where "there" is. When asked what problems this solves he says "several," but of course the question wasn't "how many?" Unfortunately, he just keeps tossing around sound bites and rhetoric and because he sounds like he knows what he's talking about (and his audience clearly doesn't) and he has a PhD, a lot of people haven't forced him to provide answers. But in a big meeting this week he gave a presentation and was asked "what impact will this have on other divisions?" He couldn't answer, because since he didn't know what this thing would be used for, he didn't know how others would have to contribute.

That's unfortunate, because if he DID have to provide answers earlier, he might actually take this germ of an idea and develop it into something that fixes a problem or otherwise addresses something we could be doing better. As it is, he's gone far down this path, and now that questions are starting to be asked, he's liable to see the whole thing derailed because people are asking "what, exactly, have you spent the last 3 months doing?"

The bottom line is, new ideas should either be solving problems or otherwise improving necessary capabilities. So your employees would be best off by understanding your needs and thinking of ways to solve them. The second-best solution is, when you come up with a really cool idea, look carefully at your business and find something it supports...be able to explain why you're doing this.

The Creatives working for you are, in fact, being paid to be creative. That's why you have them, right? So you're liable to face this problem yourself, and you need to figure out how to keep people focused on your organization's needs without making them feel like they're being boxed in and shouldn't be coming up with new ideas. The trick, I think, is to ask questions like "what problems will this solve?," or "what form do you see this taking?," in such a way that you're seen as trying to develop the idea, not kill it. Don't pose it as a challenge, but instead use questions like this to guide a discussion and help them explain things that maybe the feel but haven't put into words yet. In this way you can come up with some really creative solutions to your problems. And if they're smart, and they see that what they're coming up with sounds cool but has no applicability, they'll pull the plug themselves.

Of course, you're likely dealing with some ego issues here and some pride of authorship, so you need to be careful. Some people, like my colleague, see any question like this as a challenge and they take it personally. But changing that kind of mindset is a discussion for another time.