Stop! Before Your Next Project, Ask Yourself These Two Questions

How to superpower your next project

OK, now that I’ve got you’re attention: that thing you’re about to do — the test you’re about to run, the initiative you’re about to roll out, the big meeting you’re about to hold — are you clear on the purpose and desired outcomes? Do you know how you got here and where you’re headed next?

Have you taken the time to ask yourself two simple yet crucial questions that vastly increase your odds of having a successful outcome? If not, now’s your chance. Grab a pen and maybe a teammate, and ask:

1) Why are you doing it?

First, reflect on how you got to where you are. Some sub-questions to ask:

• What has led up to this point?
• What has prompted this? What’s the motivation?
• Why are you doing this specific thing? Is it the most appropriate or productive way to spend your time on your way to your end goal?

Being clear on the purpose and motivation is step one. When you give this question some thought, you might realize that some of the reasons are a little bogus, or inauthentic, or perhaps just simply no longer as relevant as they once were. This is a great chance to make your purpose and motivation current and accurate.

2) What are you hoping to get out of it?

Ok, you’ve gotten up to speed on how you got here. Now, it’s time to look to the future and define what your desired outcomes are. A few sub-questions to ask:

• Where would we like to go from here?
• What are our desired learnings or outcomes?
• What do we need to know in order to move forward after this project?
• What would we like to be different after this project?

And as a follow-on question to this, you may consider, “What other ways might we learn what we’re hoping to learn?” You may very well end up continuing on as planned. Or, you may realize that you could learn a lot more with a different approach.

A driving force behind these questions is a mindset of experimentation. When you see projects as experiments that you can learn from rather than tasks to be checked off, you realize the opportunity for greater learning. With an experimental mindset, being clear on why we’re doing something and what we’re hoping to get out of it become necessary steps to take.

You wouldn’t run an experiment without a hypothesis and clear pass/fail criteria; similarly, we shouldn’t execute projects without being clear on purpose, motivation, and desired outcome.

Asking these two questions is a worthwhile exercise before any size of investment of time & energy — from testing a single feature of a prototype all the way up to launching a company-wide initiative. Regardless of the nature of your next “experiment,” give yourself 5 minutes to answer these two questions — you’ll be surprised at what you get from such a simple exercise.

Read more of my work at www.lightshed.co/blog.