Force Yourself to Think Differently By Asking This Question

In the 1950s, professional basketball was experiencing a crisis. Scoring was low—so low in fact that in 1954, the Fort Wayne Pistons defeated the Minneapolis Lakers, 19-18, in the officially lowest scoring NBA game.

Why? Back then, teams could hold onto the ball until time ran out. One team would get a small lead and run down the clock. Basically, basketball was becoming a long, boring game of keep away.

Enter change agent Danny Biasone, owner of the Syracuse Nationals. Worried that the low scores would deter fans and eventually kill the game, he asked: why not add a 24-second shot clock? Biasone’s idea was so impactful that in its debut game, the Rochester Royals defeated the Boston Celtics, 98-95, creating modern-day basketball.

Biasone is an example of what I call a why not? person. Early in my career, a mentor of mine told me that I was great at asking why and pointing out the problems, but that I needed to become a why not person. I needed to start coming up with my own shot clocks.

If you think about it for a moment, the why starts the conversation—it identifies the problem. Asking why not? gets people to start thinking of alternatives, it starts the idea generation, gets the positive energy going: Why not try something new?

Think about this question in the three main parts of your work life: your day, your team and your customers.

Your day: One day as I stared at my calendar, it reminded me of an old television schedule made up of 30-minute sitcoms and 60-minute dramas. Why do we do it this way? Is it solely based on your calendar’s default settings?

Why not structure your day in a way that makes sense for you? Do you need quick check-ins with team members? Do you need longer more in-depth discussions or larger chunks of time to do actual work? Why not change your calendar’s default settings to match your needs to get things done and save you time? 

Your team: How does your organization primarily communicate with its people? I would bet that your organization mainly uses traditional one-way communications—emails, newsletters, intranet content—or traditional interactive communications—meetings and conference calls. In today’s world of on-demand content consumption, why not think about delivering that information differently?

The U.S. Navy, for example, recently launched a set of apps for sailors to access training and compliance information. The goal is to have training resources be readily available to whoever needs them. One change has been to create podcasts and video content that people can watch or listen to as their schedules allow, communicating information that normally would have been shared at an all-hands meeting, in an on-demand, user friendly way.

Your customers: Getting feedback from your customers is critical to your organization’s success, so why is most of our interaction with them measured post-transaction? Why not check-in with your customers during the process?

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently embarked on a new approach to their customers. Typically, an organization undertaking such an initiative would survey customers at the beginning of a project for a baseline assessment, beta test it with a focus group, and then conduct a survey after launch to see how customers like it, right?

USPTO asked, why are we just talking to our customers at the beginning and the end of this project? Why not talk to them in the middle of the design, or invite customers into our design sessions and work with them along the way? By engaging with their customers throughout the process, they are co-creating solutions together that customers like and will use from day one.

Thinking differently about these aspects of your work life is about making a bigger impact. Doing more, solving problems, working towards something bigger than ourselves. New shot-clock ideas are out there—just start asking, why not?  

Dan Helfrich is the federal practice leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP. Share your why not ideas with Dan at @dhelfrich21.