Your “why” should always come before your “what” and “how”. Simon Sinek taught us that with his “Start With The Why – The Golden Circle” concept. But how do we actually go about finding the underpinning reason? Trying to properly answer this “why” can easily become a philosophical and profound question.
Asking Why
There are great tools and methodologies that have already been designed to assist you to land on an answer for your “why”. One of them is predicated on the idea of asking “why” until you can’t go any further. A very famous one is “Five Whys” which goes to 5 level of depth into the question.
Ideas in their nature can be wild and broad and irrespective of the technique you are using to reach the root of your idea, regardless of the depth in interrogating the “whys”, you are still going to deal with the sheer size of different aspects that need to be covered.
Let’s take a simple idea like, “We want to build an app like AirBnB”. If you start with pulling this idea apart to try to get to the root cause of “why” you are doing this, it is likely that you will end up with a highly abstracted, yet very inspiring, reason. It could be as abstract as, “Because we want to have an impact on the lives of every single human on this planet”. “It maybe” is a fantastic slogan for your vision statement but not with much practicality.
More Than One Answer
We need an answer that is real, workable and yet reaching all different levels of the execution of your idea. You need an answer that you can take to your teams and get them to work on it to shape your business or product based on it. There is economy level, industry level, business level, technology level, … And one and only one answer will not work for all these levels.
You must also think of how you should tackle innovation and how you can continuously and effectively improve your idea as it progresses. All of that has to be considered right from the beginning. A good idea can only take you so much into the future if you don’t have an actual plan or at least a good vision for this said future.
Go North-South & East-West
So, finding your “why” is not only a North-South problem where you have to dig really deep to find out the underpinning logic of your idea, but it is also an East-West problem where you have to apply the same level of interrogation bilaterally to cover the reasoning behind every aspect of your idea at every direction.