Four Questions that Help us Get Things Done

Being an entrepreneur, building a business can be like trying to drink from a firehose. Stuff is coming at you faster than you could ever consume. You risk being drowned by it. The solution is not to get better at drinking from firehoses! At best that will offer only temporary respite before the flow becomes overwhelming again. Instead, we need to find ways to turn down the flow and to get others to help us deal with it.

In a previous article we looked at why this happens. Now we'll look at some things that help. To turn down the flow we need to be able to spot which things we can just ignore because they won’t actually help - they’re a distraction. To then get others to help us deal with the important stuff, we need to build a team that shares our vision and has the skills and resources to share the workload. Although that might sound obvious, it is hard to achieve - making decisions that involve other people is difficult, especially when the problems are complex, we can’t control everything and we’re full of biases that get in the way!

Part of the answer is to put in place some simple but effective structures to help us make decisions.?If we’re going to build an effective business we need to be able to:

• be clear about why we are building a business at all and what we want it to achieve? - that will set the long-term direction of the business.
• think strategically, weighing up the alternative ways to achieve what we want and to pick the one that best matches our objectives and values.
• turn that strategy into a practical plan that takes account of the risks, and then build the team to implement it
• know what tasks we actually need to work on next.

We can make progress by turning these into 4 basic questions. Answering them, and revisiting them often, will add structure to our thinking. Together, they will help us focus and identify what we need to do and to spot the things that are a distraction. As we’ll see later, they also drive how we structure our business so that we can make effective decisions.

The four questions are:

1.? What do you want from the business?

This is the starting point - everything flows from this question. If you’re committing time and money to build a business then you owe it to yourself to be clear about what you want in return. Is it purely about making money, or are there other drivers - helping people, learning new skills, making an impact etc. And how long can you commit to the business? If you can be as clear as possible here it will help with everything else. Answering this question honestly will take self-awareness and careful reflection to uncover what you really want. If there are multiple founders then you’ll need to work together to find the common ground. Getting clarity here will help you maintain course when things get complex.

2. What is your strategy?

Having set out what you want to achieve, your strategy describes how you will go about it and what approaches you will take. Will you, for example, make and sell a product? Or will you develop a prototype and license it to someone else? Will you seek investment or will you bootstrap the business? Your strategy will cover these high-level questions. It will ultimately help you choose where to spend your time, and help you avoid spending time on things that are not relevant.

A strategy is different to a plan - strategies set out the approaches that you will take and those that you will avoid. Plans turn those into practical steps that put the strategy into action.

3. What’s your plan for implementing that strategy?

You’ll need to think about what you will do, when and with what resources. What team will you need? In what order do you need to do things? How long will it take to make money? What are the risks and how will you manage them? Your plan will pull together all of these elements and set out the journey ahead.

4. What do you need to do to complete your part of the plan?

With a clear plan in place, you can now use it to work out what your immediate tasks are. When do you need to complete them? How do they relate to the tasks that others are working on? You will need tools to help you manage your tasks and to track progress across the team.

Working with these four questions helps deal with the challenges that lead to the firehose problem. If we know what we want then we can design our strategy to deal with the complexity and risks that we are likely to face and we can create a plan which brings together the right people and resources to put the strategy into action. And if we are clear about what we want to achieve, and the strategy and plan that we are following, it becomes much easier to inform, motivate and empower people to work with us and to share the load. Together these approaches help us turn down the flow of the firehose!?

These four questions take you from the reason you’re creating a business in the first place, right the way through to what you need to do today. That last question is where the problems become most evident - that’s where you risk being inundated by decisions and tasks. It’s where the business end of the firehose is!

The 4 questions work together to reduce that flow by focusing you on the things that matter and helping you spot the things that are distractions. For example, if your strategy is to bring a product to market by outsourcing manufacture then you don’t need to spend time talking to people about licensing your solution or setting up your own manufacturing facility. Or if your strategy is to grow the business organically by reinvesting profit then you don’t need to spend time chasing investors.?

Each of the 4 questions requires different types of thinking, different skills and different tools:

• Working out what you want from the business requires honest reflection and open discussion with other founders and stakeholders.
• Deciding on a strategy requires high-level evaluation of alternatives, often bringing in advice from others that have followed a similar path to offer different perspectives and to help avoid biases.
• Designing a plan takes detailed analysis of the resources, risks and tradeoffs involved.
• And working out what you need to do today requires an organised approach to tasks, clear prioritisation and a team that works well together.

A challenge for the founder is that we have to be able to deal with all of the 4 questions - the solution is not to try to do them all at the same time! Instead, we need a structure that separates them out and gives a way to properly prioritise how much time to spend on each, and helps identify who to get to help you. That is what we can go on to look at next - we can structure our business to build these questions in.

What do you think? Have you used these types of questions in your business? Or have you gone about it in a different way? Either way, I'd love to hear from you. And if I can help you think about the questions in your business, please do get in touch.