The Ws of Work

In yesterday’s edition I shared about the amount of time we spend on tasks that have no clearly distinguished purpose. These are the “junk miles” of work.

The same thing exists at an organizational level. Policies, processes, and habitual activities that may once have been designed to achieve something, but are now merely empty habits.

In some ways this is the inverse of Chesterton’s fence parable. That is a short anecdote that economist Chesterton presented in which you come to a fence in the middle of the road, and when you look around, it doesn’t seem to have any function. So, you simply remove it. Of course, chaos ensues. I don’t recall whether it is sheep who escape, or some other unintended bad consequence. But, the moral is clear. Don’t kill off things until you explore and interrogate their purpose.

But, we have the opposite problem in many of our workdays and work places. Processes and activities that have no obvious purpose, but which we don’t interrogate, and therefore never get rid of.

An adjacent problem exists with some new activity within organizations. Whether tasks, projects, or portions of projects— often, employees are doing them with no understanding of their purpose. Of course, here, they may actually have a purpose. But, the person charged with executing them doesn’t know what it is.

Obfuscating Metrics

Moreover, we can further obscure the actual purpose by adding metrics and goals that are irrelevant to the intention behind the activity. For example, imagine a call-center operator who is responding to calls from people who need tech-support. Everyone of us knows that when you are a customer who needs Tech Support, what you want us to have your problem solved. You don’t like it when it takes a long time, but you realize that the actual process of software problem can be time consuming.

Call-center operators are often measured on volume of calls per hour. So if the operator is attempting to increase his volume of calls, he is working at cross purposes to solving your problem. That’s why customers feel under served when they call or chat with tech-support. They are given instructions to do things on their own that don’t work. So they call back but again interact with an operator trying to get off the phone or complete the chat as soon as possible.

All of those different, short tasks may help the call-center meet its per-hour goal, but they don’t help you get your computer running again. And if you are a call, Center operator in that circumstance, while you may implicitly know that your job is to solve the customers problem, it has largely disappeared in the empty task of logging calls and completing them.

But I digress. The real issue with a loss of clear purpose is that it’s very hard to know how to approach a task or project, or when you have done it well—or worst of all, when you have wasted your time.

The 5 Ws

In discussing this, I discovered that one of my clients uses a model described in an Adobe blog article about the?Five Ws. This is how ?Adobe puts it:

According to the principle of the Five Ws, a report can only be considered complete if it answers these questions starting with an?interrogative word:

• Who??is it about?
• What?happened?
• When??did it take place?
• Where??did it take place?
• Why??did it happen?

As you see, they have co-opted the journalistic playbook of 5 W questions and applied them to projects before. The key point is that context is critical when you are trying to accomplish anything. Whatever you are tasked with doing will be improved by understanding the why behind it.?

There is a context that emerges from each of these questions. Because on the surface they appear to be fairly superficial and not necessarily germane to projects. But, they actually create a structure upon which you can build a rich understanding.

Let’s look at them in reverse order.

Why: This is, perhaps the most important question. It is not asking why as a generic proposition. But rather what is the motivating factor for this specific project at this time in this organization. That explains the problem we’re trying to solve, or the milestone we’re trying to achieve. Knowing the why is critical.

What: Here we are asking what are the parameters, and what is the scope. How will we know when this project is complete? If we are building a website does it have five pages or 50? If we are building a product, will we stop at the MVP or will we filled the full robust beta for release?

Who may seem obvious since you are likely the one asking these questions. But it’s not just a question of who does the project, but for whom is the project being completed? That gives you insight into their needs and concerns, and tells you who the stakeholders are, and who you must consult when you have questions about the scope.

It may also suggest possible partners, influencers, and subject matter experts, who may be important to the project or initiative.

And finally, How is going to be a critical piece of your project design. It will tell you, your budget, deadlines, and the latitudes to have in designing the project.

You can apply these questions to most any task, project, or initiative. Often, you may be the person who answers the questions. But until they have been explicitly answered, there isn’t real clarity. What’s amazing is that, although these are fairly remedial questions, depending on what the answers are, your direction can be massively altered.

Imposing that kind of rigor on our own activity, makes a huge difference to the quality of your work and the amount of value it produces. And whether your are producing that value for yourself, or for an employer, it doesn’t change the gratification you can generate for ourselves through directed and thoughtful work.

When employees have tools like this at their disposal and are able to work with a thought partner to utilize them, they multiply their value and productivity. Schedule a call with me to talk about how beyond better coaching as a service could help you scale your employees so they can scale your enterprise.