One of us was away for a long weekend with extended family recently when someone mentioned they work in insurance. Recently out of college, it was their first real job and things were going well.
Our six-year-old daughter looked up and asked: “What’s insurance?”
And he didn’t really have an answer. He laughed. “Great question,” he said. Then he stalled a bit and said, “Honestly I don’t really have an answer.” The conversation moved on. But this stuck with us. Here is someone who spends forty-plus hours a week inside an industry and couldn’t explain it to a curious kid at the dinner table. Not because he isn’t smart. Because nobody had ever made him explain it, including himself. Especially in a way a six-year-old could grasp. (FYI)
There’s an old Steve Jobs clip we like where he talks about how he learned to run a company. We’d highly recommend watching the clip (it’s short), but here is an excerpt (in his typical brash style):
“Throughout the years in business, I found something which was I always ask why you do things. And the answers you invariably get are “that’s just the way things are done”. Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That’s what I found.”
His method for learning how to run a business was mostly asking why. Why do we do it this way? Why does this process exist? And most of the time, nobody knew. The answer was almost always some version of “that’s just how it’s done.” The people doing the work had inherited the how without ever receiving the why. As professional question askers ourselves, we couldn’t push back strongly on Jobs’s findings based on our experience.
It’s one thing to ask questions about what you don’t know. It’s another to realize how little you can explain about what you supposedly do know. Try it on yourself. Explain your job to a six-year-old. Not your title, your job. What do you actually do, for whom, and why does anyone pay for it? It’s harder than it sounds. And the difficulty is informative. The parts you can’t explain simply are usually the parts you understand least, no matter how many hours you’ve logged doing them.
We think about this in hiring a lot. When we interview candidates, some of the most revealing moments come from the simplest questions. What does your company actually do? Why does your role exist? Why did your team do it that way? People who can answer plainly tend to be people who have thought about the work, not just performed it. And people who have thought about the work are usually the ones who improve it.
The same test applies to employers. Walk your floor and ask people why a process works the way it does. If the answer is “that’s just how we’ve always done it,” you’ve found either an opportunity or a problem, and possibly both. Jobs built a company on the observation that most of what organizations do is inherited rather than examined. The people willing to ask why, at the risk of sounding like a six-year-old, are the ones who find what everyone else stopped seeing.
Somewhere around age five or six, kids ask “why” dozens of times a day, and somewhere not long after, most of us get trained out of it. It starts feeling risky. You might sound uninformed. You might annoy someone. So we nod along instead.
Our six-year-old hasn’t learned to nod along yet. We’re in no rush to make her.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team