Too much "why" knowledge, not enough "how"

A former colleague tells a story of an annual road trip with college buddies. In anticipation of the NCAA basketball “Final Four” weekend, they convene in Los Angeles then drive to Las Vegas to watch the game amid the noise and color of the casinos.

On one such trip, the car broke down “in the middle of nowhere” and, as my pal tells it, “there were four guys with a total of seven college degrees, under the hood staring in silence at a smoking engine.” One finally said what they all knew to be true – “too much ‘why’ knowledge, not enough ‘how’ knowledge.”

I am reminded of that story every time a management team, confronted with its own version of a smoking engine, stares blankly; fixed more on why they are stalled and not enough on how to get going again. It is understandable. It reflects a human urge to analyze, a political urge to lay blame and a business urge to not admit mistakes. In combination, the urges don’t add up to urgency, they can paralyze -- and time passes.

The better approach is to bring a little balance to the equation. It may not be possible to find more “how” knowledge when stalled on the road, but you can eliminate a fair bit of the overwhelming wealth of “why” knowledge. Pare down the analysis to that which can help reveal the best next steps; the rest is hand-wringing.

Focus the team on the business goal. For those four guys in the desert, it was a weekend in Las Vegas. Rather than staring at the engine, they should have been looking for their AAA cards and reaching for their cell phones or recalling the last pay phone they passed. For the management team, there are revenue objectives, program goals and other targets to hit.

The danger is to be labeled, as has Dilbert’s pointy-headed boss, as having a “bias for action.” You can hear the derision in the phrase even as you say it to yourself. But there is nothing wrong with action when the course is clear. In fact, when the course is clear, inaction is malfeasance.

The truth is that a smoking engine is not an unusual event, it is quite the norm in businesses that rely more and more on innovation, customer relationships and intellectual capital. The more business depends on people, the more likely there will be smoke.

We are taught that in a real fire, the best way to deal with smoke is to keep our head down low and covered. Dealing with the smoke of business requires quite the opposite; a counterintuitive approach. By keeping our heads up, we are better able to know what our options are for continuing to make progress against our goals. We stand a real chance of figuring out what to do next.

There is real value in knowing what to do next and value is why we set out on the road in the first place.