There is usually another question underneath the obvious one

#015

I tend to get interested in the part that was already decided before everyone started looking for the answer.

I’ve spent a good part of my working life wondering why perfectly intelligent people can look at something and somehow not have the same question I do.

I had it when I was selling new-build homes. I’d walk through another development with nearly identical floor plans and wonder who had actually decided this was how people wanted to live.

Also later in commercial real estate. There was a lot of attention on buildings, leases, numbers, and reports, while I often learned more by talking to the people actually using those buildings. If a tenant was struggling, I usually knew early. If they were growing, I knew that too. I didn't have some brilliant system, but I had been talking to them all along.

I still do the same thing now.

Tell me a hotel needs more weekday bookings and I don’t immediately start thinking about hotel packages. I start wondering why someone would stay in a hotel on a Tuesday in the first place.

Tell me a housing concept has been developed for empty nesters and I want to know why those people would leave the homes they already have.

Tell me what a target audience wants and there’s a good chance my next question will be: how do we know?

I’m not trying to be contrarian. Quite often the existing answer turns out to make perfect sense. I just don’t like starting with it. I want to go back to the person who eventually has to do something. Buy it. Book it. Move there. Use it. Give something else up for it. Spend money on it. Change a habit because of it.

What does the decision look like from their side?

Once you start there, the world around the original question gets much bigger.

A decision about an office is also about the commute, home, children, concentration, convenience, and everything someone has gotten used to while working elsewhere. A decision about moving can be about money and footage, but just as easily about friends, freedom, possessions, travel, or where everyone gathers for Christmas. A boring financial product is competing for attention with pretty much everything someone would rather be doing.

Businesses need categories to organize themselves.

People just have lives.

And once I start looking at those lives, I often end up somewhere that has very little to do with the industry I started in. Culture, economics, another business, an everyday habit, a place, something people have recently stopped doing, or something they’ve quietly started doing before anyone has made much of it.

Sometimes two things that seemed completely unrelated suddenly aren’t. That’s the part I like. None of this means I assume my first instinct is right. A thought is a reason to look. It isn’t proof that I’ve found something.

But some questions become a lot more interesting when you stop accepting the answer they arrived with.

Capsule Creators is where I follow those questions.