The retrospective “Why”

So, I’m sure we’ve all come across Simon Sinek’s seminal talk on “Start with the why”. It’s a hugely inspiring and provokes a change in mentality that can completely shift the focus of your business.

But therein lies the problem. It’s a shift in focus, not a fundamental decision before you start. If there’s a shift in focus then there’s little to say there can’t be a shift in focus in the future. Is that wise when developing something as fundamental as the reason your company exists. In terms of buy-in from external sources, it might seem a little “convenient” that you have retroactively decided that this is now your why. It needs to exist from the start (even if poorly defined) than to be retro-engineered.

Let’s imagine Nestlé, a company fraught with image problems. Let’s say that tomorrow, Nestlé proclaim they their “Why” is: “to better the planet through innovation within the food and beverage”. It’s a little vague and wishy washy I’ll admit but probably accurate for a large multinational with lots of stakeholders. Imagine how difficult it would be to engineer all of their marketing efforts and product development efforts in order to achieve that goal and how difficult it would be to get public acceptance of this why.

Let’s now imagine something a little more plausible. Let’s say IKEA decide that their Why is “decreasing the planet’s need for timber through innovative product design”. This seems more plausible right? We could imagine they launch a nice multi million pound marketing effort in order to push this. There’s still be some resistance (internally and externally) to a focus on an idea that didn’t necessarily exist when the company was founded. “Do they really mean that?”, “I wonder if this is just spin?”, “Does this come form the Founder/CEO or the Marketing team?”.

If we now look at SpaceX, an organisation that started with a “Why” (even if it wasn’t referred to as a “why”). There is very very little doubt why that company exists. It’s objective is so real, so palpable, so free of any spin that whenever the company presents itself, it’s clear as to whether the companies representative means what they say. By starting with the why, you can almost remove any doubt from onlookers as to whether the companies’ actions or intents are true. Every public message can be scrutinised and evaluated back to “well does this message actually help the company do what it says it set out to do…. ah OK, that makes sense”.

So, if you already have an organisation that’s either missing it’s why or is in the process of developing it, try as best as you can to avoid developing what you’d like the why to be and instead, just solidify what it really is. If the why isn’t what you want it to be, then you have a much bigger problem on your hands.