Why ask Why?

[Editor's note: Compuserve is closing down its OurWorld website hosting after many years. So I decided to resurrect some articles I had online there. This one dates from 1994. For those of you too young to remember, "Why Ask Why" was the tagline of a Budweiser ad campaign for Bud Dry.]

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The standard questions every cub reporter learns to ask are: who, what, where, when, why, how, and how much. With these tools, the reporter can get answers to describe almost any situation. And the analyst can describe any system. The "who, what, where, when, and how much" questions tend to elicit quantitative answers, namely specific people, things, places, times, and amounts. Not surprisingly, these tend to be the easiest questions to answer: "Just the facts, ma'am."

"How" is useful because it looks at processes by which things get done. How do you get from Point A to Point B? How do you manufacture widgets? How do you fill out this form? How do you fix a hole in a bucket? "How" reveals methods, tools, subsystems and timing required to achieve some goal.

Yet, I think that "Why" is the most profound question. Certainly it can be the most embarrassing--just ask a toddler's parent! "Why" is unique among the questioning words because it's the only one that digs into reasons, attitudes, beliefs, values, and rules governing a situation. It's an uncomfortable question, because we are forced to examine our motives and rationales for the system under study, sometimes for the first time. Why do you do this this way? Why do you do this at all?

When the story is some process you're trying to analyze, most of the W's will yield clear-cut answers: only "Why" begs you to go below the surface to discover meaning behind the process. "Why" will help you uncover the operating assumptions, the legal and regulatory bases, past practices, and corporate mythology underlying the process as it exists today.

Sometimes, people back into the "Why" question.

Corning Glass Works had been working to instill the Total Quality Management (TQM) paradigm for several years. The group that does the taxes decided to see where they could make improvements in their products, to make it easier to "delight the customer", namely the IRS. One task they did was to prepare a summary of expenses. This task took more than 400 work hours each year: any improvement would mean major savings.

Rather than dive into improving the existing process, they decided to talk to their customer about what they (the IRS) wanted in Corning's tax returns. Obviously, there are legal and regulatory requirements about filing tax returns. But there is also more than one way to organize the information in the return.

Corning discovered that the IRS, in its biannual audits, spent many man-months decoding the expense summary. Why had Corning been doing the summary? Because they had assumed that's what the IRS wanted. By questioning the rationale behind the process, Corning and the IRS came to an amicable agreement on what was really wanted, and both organizations saved time, effort, and money!

Corning probably discovered that the expense summary had originally been done for one of three reasons: (a) someone thought some regulation required it; (b) once upon a time the IRS really did ask for it that way; or (c) it was a holdover from an antique accounting system. But regulations, technology, supporting processes and customer expectations do change over time. The trick is to adapt appropriately.

The answer "We've always done it that way" indicates lost corporate knowledge about the origins of a process or system. The good news is that you don't have to understand all the details of what was state-of-the-art during the War of 1812. What you do need to discover is what your customer's real needs are, and what the current environment's rules, regulations, and expectations are. Without that knowledge, it's impossible to make safe, effective change.

Deming preaches the gospel of continuous improvement (assuming that the process is under control). I admit that's well and good, but every so often we should step back and ask questions like:

• "Why are we doing it in this particular way?"
• "Why are we doing it at all?"

Time marches on, and as it goes, much changes: technology, legislation, customers, work force, industry practices. What was a satisficing solution some time ago may no longer be viable, despite those continuous improvements.

Or it may still be the best way to go.