3.4 ‘How’ and ‘What’
According to Sinek (2011), the ‘How’ and the ‘What’ are just as important as the ‘Why’ and should be reviewed and planned once you have agreed your ‘Why’. This starts by reconsidering or gathering more evidence or data whether a change is required. What outcomes do you hope to achieve? How will you achieve them? How will you measure the impact of your achieved outcomes?
If the outcome is that a change is required and if you do not define what you need to get done or plan how to get it done, then the ‘why do it?’ is irrelevant: the impact will not be achieved, and progress will not be made.
The context for your ‘Why’, will normally direct the approach for working on your ‘How’ and ‘What’, and may use different frameworks, conversations and resources available to you to make the change. This is especially true when futures planning as the how and what maybe unknown, as options are explored for different possible futures. Later in the course we introduce frameworks that are commonly used for futures planning.
As a final part of your workshop, it can be useful to look at your ‘How’ and ‘What’ now, to capture what might need to change, to inform further sessions to look at these in detail. If you have used the workshop output template review and update it.
| Now | Future |
|---|---|
| This is our 'Why' | This could be our 'Why' |
| How we work now | How we could work |
| What we do now | What we could do |
| Areas we would like to improve | |
| Anything we should stop doing? |
Activity 9 What’s our Why? – Planning a workshop
Drawing on the outline of running a ‘What’s our Why?’ workshop, plan a workshop you could run with either a team you are part of, or group that you collaborate with.
We have provided a What’s your why toolkit which is a downable PDF/PowerPoint that contains elements from this section to use for running your own workshop.
Download the toolkit [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]