Not Knowing "How".

I'm noticing increasing individual and collective asking of others in private, business and public life that they answer the following: "How...how are you (or am I) going to do that?"

In one of my last jobs as an employee, a contract came in for strategy consulting for a major retail client and was assigned to me. I was pressured by my manager to communicate "how" I was going to do it and my answer, explaining my experiential process, was not the answer my manager wanted to hear. During that time period, another strategy project was requested by a financial services client. The manager and another consultant determined that using a "thought tool", that someone in the company had read about, was "how" that project would be done. The general consensus was that I would surely sink and the other consultant would succeed.

In the days that followed, I spent a fair amount of time staring at a large blank whiteboard, doodling around with some terms that kept popping into my mind, thinking about experiences and learning that seemed to fit, following my intuition about what to research and who to interview, and playing around with some patterns, inter-relationships and visuals. Strategies began to emerge for potential large-scale client opportunities and the project was deemed a big success. The other project proceeded much more definitively than mine in a step-by-step path to meet the goal; and then it hit a wall because the final recommendations were pretty much common sensical, small, incremental improvements for the client that did not justify their investment. Concessions had to be made to the client.

So now, a decade later, I think: could I have done better answering "how will I do it"? Probably not to the satisfaction of the person asking. What I have learned is to be vigilant (the "V" in D.R.I.V.E.), and to help others be vigilant, about the negative power and creative buzz-kill in insisting upon asking: "how?".

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