Keep asking why
At the end of the True Blue Blazing conference last week in Melbourne, everyone was asked to contribute to the word cloud of the things they would start ‘doing tomorrow’ after hearing all the content from the day.
If I’m being honest, I wrote ‘sleep’. Turns out I wasn’t the only one.
To be fair, it had been a big day, full of the kind of practical talks and side-conversations that have you reaching for your notes app regularly and taking photos of slide decks.
The most popular response was ‘ask why’.
I’m not surprised. It was the refrain of almost every session. One of the best talks I heard across the day was Richard Phillips from Davanti. He listed off six things he has learned in Implementation projects over time.
The first one resonated with me – “People are terrible at predicting their own behaviour”. You can have all the design workshops you like, where people describe the behaviour they’d like to display, but until you watch real people working through a process in real time, at their real desk, you won’t understand what users really need or why. More requirements gathering should happen on the shop floor instead of in a conference room with a whiteboard.
He also spoke about getting to the ‘why’ of every process, rather than just building for a customer’s request. Asking why helps us keep refining, and solving for the problems (and users) that are there instead of just building for building’s sake.
Asking why came up everywhere across the conference… and actually the thing that was hardly mentioned, was AI. Despite the AI overload at so many tech events this year, it seemed that the question “why” was a desire to get back to the humans at the heart of every project. The automations and the data and the platforms are all there to serve a purpose for real people, and getting back to those people and their purpose is the difference between success and just change for change’s sake.
Asking why is almost always the best next step. Keep asking why.
Also worth reading…
Just because I’ve posted a lot of Salesforce stuff lately… It’s not just Salesforce projects that need to get Change Management investment early (obviously).
This was from ERP Today earlier in the year.
Doing the work at the beginning of a project to understand readiness (Change Impact Assessment) makes a significant difference on the success of a project.
One of the best quotes that I’ll steal is: (when there’s pressure around a project…) “...pace can feel reassuring because movement is easier to demonstrate than preparedness.”
Don’t just go fast because it feels good. Take time to be prepared. Talk to your people.
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