Whys and hows

In my first few years learning planning, there was a big focus on finding a big strategic idea. We looked for hard problems, insight (a topic I’ll gladly skirt here), surprising truths, and tension. This goal was to have this short narrative culminate in a jazzy strategy line, so the process was subject of endless toiling and crafting.

For a handful of reasons, I think that’s becoming less important to the process of creating ideas:

• More media channels
• Less need to be TV-led
• More owned platforms to manage
• Less money per activation
• More agency sub-specialization
• Less time to do traditional planning
• More project-led engagements

We’re in a period of strategy that’s less deliberate, more emergent and experimental. (I hope it swings back, but this is what I’ve noticed lately).

However, even specialized projects, like launching TikTok channels (vs. being AOR and orchestrating all brand comms), need clarity on the problems they solve for the brand. An old pal of a framework is super useful here, with a couple new band members.

The 5 whys framework was developed by the founder of Toyota in the early 20th century. It asks us to go further into what we already know and demand more of ourselves than a cursory explanation of the problem (e.g., “awareness is low”).

Frameworks are useful for the questions they help us ask and this is one of the best examples of that; by repeating itself, it insists that there must be something more that we know, something deeper than we can solve for.

In a podcast interview, former Amazon executive Colin Bryar talks about how they used the 5 whys to solve hidden problems, and to let other people know how to avoid them:

“Usually when you’re fixing those defects, you typically find one or two other things, errors lurking, that will have eventually happened had you not taken the right approach… You want to shout about them because 1) you want to fix, but 20 you don’t want other people to make the same mistake.”

If whys are critical to narrowing focus, in a quick-turn, rapid-evolution environment, hows are where we explore actions.

In his 1965 booklet, A Technique For Producing Ideas, James Webb writes, “Take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it.”

Once the why is set, begin to explore hows. It can be used for depth, as in the case of the 5 whys:

How do we connect with audience x?

How do we get their attention on platform y?

How do we get scale out of this?

How much of our budget should we spend on this?

How will we know it worked?

Or for breadth:

How can targeting or medium help us reach a new audience?

How can we use creators to make our message more credible?

How can we stand out amidst the incredible amount of creativity on TikTok?

How can a technology partner help us deliver on-demand customer service?

How can we use this as a beta for our next campaign?

If you map this out, it looks a bit like a bowtie. The whys help us narrow, the hows help us expand.

The benefit ladder Mark Pollard outlines in Strategy Is Your Words also uses self-questioning to get to something richer.

Like whys turn problems into clarity, and hows turn clarity into actions, this gives us prompts to turn truth into meaning.

In a profession where questions are often our most valuable currency, it’s wise to collect frameworks and steal graciously.

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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben