The superficiality of this present age never ceases to amuse me. Last week my voice coach was nearly crushed by the pressure owing to students participating in a single group class and handed over some of us to the tutelage of his wife, who was also a music teacher. His wife, who didn’t take note of our context, began the training with one basic question. I must admit, it wasn’t an easy one. “What’s your motivation to learn music?”, she quizzed us, and silence dropped into the chattering class.
After rephrasing that question a few more times, one of the students promptly answered “I want to learn music”. Is that the answer or the question? I wondered. And then the tutor pressed her, “I understand, but what makes you want to learn music?” The student thought awhile and responded “Because I love music!” One couldn’t care to see a motivation for their ambitions beyond oneself. The real answer to the tutor’s question is not a superficial “I like it. So I do it”.

A powerful purpose almost always doesn’t have “I” at the center.

I would have been glad had the problem stopped at just music. But it didn’t. An entrepreneur once came to us at a time when his business simply wasn’t escalating and his funds were drying up. He didn’t come to us with the problem, rather with a solution he thought might work and hoped that we could create the solution for him after studying his requirements. But our folks were curious about his business. We worked along-side him asking him some candid, thought-provoking questions about the purpose of the solution. Quizzing him not only gave us a handle on the problem to be solved, but gave him new insights about the giants he was facing.

It helped him see with crystal clarity that it wasn’t “he” who was actually facing the problems, but his clients!

Once the entrepreneur saw value in our rooting process, he also saw value in roping us in for the solution conceptualization phase. But the real problem cropped up when we began developing the solution. Three months post the business analysis phase, one day, he let out a cry “I don’t like the idea of the solution being owned up by the users – it’s my solution and I want to have control over it!” To the entrepreneur, the solution, firstly, met an intrinsic need in him, more than solving the problem of his clients. The purpose of that solution finally spiraled down to a big ‘I’!

As an analyst and a BI enthusiast, I figured that for a business to be successful, a solution provider has to brace himself and ask some smart, sound and solid questions about the purpose, goal and plausible business impact of the solution, not with skepticism but with curiosity. If you turn to third-world countries like India or China for your business solutions, then you may want a consulting outsourcing partner with a business outlook. Questioning the premise of the solution not only gives a good context for the solution creator but also gives the client an outside-in perspective of the value the solution brings to his users. More than once, our clients have found value in our RadicalRootingTM approach where we ask, answer and solve business problems and measure solution performance. RadicalRootingTM helps us to not just create solutions, but steward the client’s projects responsibly by maximizing value for the clients through proposed alternatives. Well, I think we just about understand that our purpose at Stylus is not about “Us”!

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