When I biked from Key West to Maine in 2012, I hired a young woman to drive my RV and support me as I pedaled up the East Coast. In New Hampshire, she flooded the RV and destroyed my computer which had been on the floor.
It ruined an otherwise fabulous experience for me. I couldn’t get past it. I was obsessed with “why” it happened. Why did she forget to empty the tank? Why did I leave my computer on the floor? Why didn’t she feel contrite?
I was stuck – I needed an explanation, a story, a lesson to be learned. As a result, I wasn’t making the shift from “why?” to “what’s next?”
Why are we fascinated with why something happened? Because we all love a good story! The world does not make sense to us without identifying a cause-and-effect. The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “Explanations bind facts together. They help them make more sense.”
Behaviorists call it “Narrative Fallacy” – our tendency to look at a sequence of facts and weave in an explanation to give a situation meaning. This mental game seduces us into thinking that identifying the cause-and-effect actually makes a difference.
But the problem is that we get stuck in the backward-looking story instead of using the facts for forward-looking action.
Many bosses are obsessed with explaining the story behind their results instead of just looking at the results (the facts!) and moving forward.
“Why something happened” is merely a distraction from taking action.
By shifting our language from “Why?” to “What’s next?” we can shift our focus from the story to the facts, thereby freeing us to determine the only thing that actually matters: what are we going to do next?
