August 2022

At my company is a mystery coffee platform established. There you can be matched for coffee breaks with other employees who you probably do not know yet. These random meetings are a great chance to learn about things that are currently beyond your bubble. During the last mystery coffee meeting at my work, I learned a basic thinking system that quite struck me in its significance. So basic that almost everybody is partly applying it at least subconsciously and therefore neglecting the importance.

I am writing about the three question words what, why and how. In the mentioned order they provide a sound system for planning projects, tasks and even the operation of companies. These three questions give a very logical structure to think and help to discover all important focal points at the beginning of a project.

The common unaware use of this system often causes the forgetting of single questions in relevant situations. The answers to the missing questions are then appearing on their own later, often accompanied by great trouble.

Young engineers as an example tend to jump directly to the how which describes the implementation but fail to accurately define what they want to develop. This favors swimming around in indecision and creating a structure becomes much more difficult. Others miss asking the why of the project and probably rush into mountains of unnecessary work.

During writing these lines the utilization of this simple question system feels very obvious. But at least for starting engineers like myself this is not the case. We are taught in the universities to think analytically, which means to think in steps belonging to the solution. Exams and exercises are mostly solution oriented. The what is clearly described in the text and the how is required. The why is often only indirectly clear and of secondary importance. Trained like this we fall into the habit of holding huge implementation plans in our memory but fail at explaining what single elements are doing and why they exist at all. I think simply being aware of this circumstance helps immensely in preventing it.

Next to giving a sound thinking logic the three questions also provide a great structure to communicate in. They provoke exactly the answers that are needed by outsiders to develop a good basic understanding of projects, individual elements or whatever needs explanation. So it is a good style to directly address the what, why and lastly the how in presentations or emails.

You probably guessed it: I got this knowledge from a diligent systems engineer who is thinking in models and asking these three questions in an endless loop to extract sufficient usable models. These models allow precise predictions of change effects in ever growing systems. After doing a quick internet search of ‘what why how’ I found out that fortunately a lot of thoughts are already spent on this important topic. Simon Sinek even wrote a whole book about this topic. I intended to present my learnings and thoughts from the aforementioned coffee break in a short manner. Always ask the three.