a two-question toolkit

It can be hard to know what the heck you’re supposed to say to your people. Maybe you don’t know them well yet; maybe you’ve never thought of yourself as an inspiring speaker; maybe you already have a robust set of metrics and a scoreboard everyone can see and any words you’d add to those feel superfluous to you. 

All in all, it can be easy to opt out of the “over-communication” that the best leaders practice.

My path out of this common confusion and into inspiring clarity has been a very simple pair of questions:

Question 1: What is so?

Question 2: So what?

The simplicity of these questions is sneaky. They are quite potent. They jar shifty, avoidant communicators (that is, me) out of casual, low-info optimism that leaves people gossiping in the dark. They make me get real. They also make me tell a story. 

Each question is a little machine with its own output:

Question 1 → [facts]

Question 2 → [stories]

An effective leader provides a steady diet of facts and stories to her team. The stories are built from the facts. This enables her people to know what’s going on and what to make of it.

The best stories make meaning from the facts. They remind the team what kind of people we are and, more specifically, what those kind of people do when they encounter facts like these. A longer version of “so what?” is “and this is what we’re going to do about it: ____ because we’re the kind of people who: ______”

A great coach, Tim Davis, once had me commit to a “noticing” practice. I was to walk around for 15 minutes and just observe the physical world around me. The only question I was to carry around with me on my noticing walk was “What is so?” I was supposed to “answer” the question, as much as possible, without using words. 

This practice drew my attention to a move I was making all the time in my own head, then with people I led. I was substituting stories for facts. I was treating interpretations of reality as reality itself. Facts, it turns out, are quite narrow. They become stories upon very slight human touch. 

When I brought this practice back to work and I forced myself to face facts, strictly defined, I opened a new set of possible stories about what our team could do next. I could take agreements with my team, our mission, our values back to first principles. I wasn’t as trapped averaging us against what we had just tried or anxieties about things we couldn’t control.

At this time I was leading a startup that had blitzscaled from a team of 5 to a team of 1500 people in less than 18 months. We were a tight and effective team. We were also headed for a massive downsizing. The timing of the downsizing was uncertain. But a lot of hardworking high performers were about to be out of work and we all saw this coming.

In this case, I made a crude t-table: Left column: what is so? Right column: so what? In each all hands meeting for weeks and weeks, I brought up the slide with that table, updated with new facts as we had them.

What is so?

So what?

This practice didn’t vaporize all anxiety for all members of the team. It didn’t reduce the volatility of the world we operated in. It did, however, build a shared language and shared perspective for us. It narrowed focus on what we did know, who we had agreed to be for each other and our patients, and what we were going to do next.

It brought us back into our locus of control and influence. 

If you don’t know the answers to these two questions, your people definitely don’t. They will come up with answers, but in moments of change or crisis, those answers are often inaccurate, unhelpful, or both. If you do know the answers, share them. Repeat them. Update them. 

This is the best you can do. When you do it well, you build trust. Your people will find themselves inspired, even if you aren’t a particularly inspiring orator. 

There’s something powerful about clarity on the facts and coherence of the story we tell about ourselves with those facts. Find that power and use it.