How You Look At It Makes a Difference

When I was much younger, I had a saying: “Nobody has the right to be wrong.”

Not only did I think this was a clever saying, I absolutely believed it. Of course, in time I came to see things differently:

• None of us are born with all the right answers in our heads.
• When we do learn, it is often through the experience of having been wrong and then realizing it.
• Right and wrong are generally not black and white. Sometimes they are, but more often than not there are lots of shades of gray.
• There is often more than one “right answer,” just as there is often more than one wrong answer.

Perhaps even more significant than these points, though, is that I learned that

• How you solve a problem depends on how you look at it. Whether you even call it a problem or not depends on how you look at it.

When I realized this, years ago, I became a strong advocate of listening to differing views, and learned to play devil’s advocate with myself and others, just to help ensure we didn’t overlook any important solutions or views.

I believe this is an important skill for everyone to have. So, today I want to talk about a few of the different ways of looking at things: the So What, What If, and Keep It Simple approaches.

The “So What” Approach

I don’t know how many times in my life I’ve put energy into something that didn’t matter. Bet you’ve done this a few times, too, huh?

For me, a lot of those times were when I decided to do something without asking, “so what is the real point of this, what do I get out of it?”

A good example of asking this question is mentioned in the New York Times interview of Steve Jobs, when he said the following with respect to Amazon’s Kindle device:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore … Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So, in a way he was saying Yes, I can develop a book reader, too, but so what? People don’t read.

The “What If” Approach

Contrast the above approach to the Kindle with Amazon’s own Jeff Bezos’ approach. The following is an excerpt from Business Week’s interview of Bezos regarding innovation and customer focus:

“Q: Every company claims to be customer-focused. Why do you think so few are able to pull it off?”
“A: Companies get skills-focused, instead of customer-needs focused. [They ask] “why should we do that—we don’t have any skills in that area.” … A much more stable strategy is to start with “what do my customers need?” Then do an inventory of the gaps in your skills. Kindle is a great example. If we set our strategy by what our skills happen to be rather than by what our customers need, we never would have done it. We had to go out and hire people who know how to build hardware devices and create a whole new competency for the company.” [via Tim O'Reilly's article]

So, who’s right? Jobs or Bezos? Both, of course. If you want to sell a 100 million units of something, as Jobs would probably be interested in doing, then an ebook reader is not the thing to sell … the market is not there. But, if you already have lots of book-reading customers, then why not develop the skill to give them an ebook delivery system? And, like Jobs did with iTunes (when he gave music lovers an entire music delivery system), Bezos gave book readers an ebook delivery system, not just a reader.

The “Keep It Simple” Approach

Years ago, Vickie and I were watching a Discovery Channel documentary of some primitive culture, and when they talked about the religious beliefs of the tribe, I said to Vickie: “How could anybody ever believe anything so stupid?” I could picture anthropologists spending a lifetime trying to unravel how anybody could come to believe what that tribe believed.

Then, Vickie replied “That’s all they know.”

Of course, that’s all they know. It doesn’t matter how they came to believe it. Once they are given more information, they’ll begin to see things differently (in time). So, while I would have been ready to go out and buy a book to see why people believe what they do, Vickie spared me the expense by making it as simple as it really is. (Actually, I subsequently bought books on this subject, but much later.)

I Know This Is Not Rocket Science

There is probably nothing new in this to you. You probably have used these different modes of thinking many times over the years, particularly if you are an old fart like I am. But what you might not do often enough is think about what style of thinking is “best” for you at any given time. I’m certainly guilty of this. I’ve probably used the “So What” approach way to often, and the “Keep It Simple” approach far too infrequently.

So, maybe this will jog you (and me) into trying on different thinking caps for a while.

By the way, there are probably other important modes of thinking that I have not listed. Please feel free to add them with your insights in the comments section.