The product review was fifteen minutes in when someone on the team asked why. Not how, not when, not what the timeline looked like. Why. Why are we building this feature? Why now? Why this way?
The room went quiet for longer than it should have.
There is a framework in journalism, dating back to Aristotle, called the five Ws and one H. What, where, when, who, how, and why. Any story, any event, any situation can be understood by answering all six. Reporters are trained to ask them reflexively. The rest of us are not.
Watch a child. A three-year-old asks why constantly. Why is the sky blue? Why do I have to go to bed? Why does the dog bark? It is their primary tool for understanding the world. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we stop. The question drops out of our vocabulary so quietly we do not notice its absence.
There are reasons for this. "Why" is confrontational. It implies that the current state of affairs requires justification. Unlike "what" or "how", which request information, "why" requests a rationale. And requesting a rationale can feel, to the person being asked, like an accusation.
In Turkish, the word for criticism is eleştiri, from the root ele, meaning to sift, to pass through a sieve. It originally meant to examine something by separating its parts. The Arabic equivalent that also exists in Turkish, tenkit, means something quite different: to peck, to poke, to needle. Same concept, vastly different connotations.
When someone asks "why" in a meeting, the room often hears tenkit when what was offered was eleştiri. The question was an attempt to sift. It was received as a peck.
This confusion costs organisations more than most technical debt.
I run a company with four divisions. The decisions that have gone wrong, almost without exception, are the ones where nobody asked why. Where the team (myself included) moved from problem to solution without pausing at the question in between.
Why are we using this database? Because we used it last time. Why are we targeting this market? Because a competitor did. Why is this deadline what it is? Because someone said it should be.
These are not answers. They are echoes. And building on echoes is how you end up with products that technically work but solve the wrong problem.
The discipline of asking why before how is not natural. It requires deliberate effort. It slows things down. In a culture that rewards speed and output, slowing down to ask a foundational question feels like inefficiency.
It is the opposite of inefficiency. It is the only real efficiency. Every hour spent building the wrong thing is an hour wasted, and the only way to know whether you are building the right thing is to ask why you are building it at all.
I have started doing something in meetings that felt awkward at first and now feels obvious. Before any discussion about implementation, I ask one question: "What problem are we solving, and for whom?" If the room cannot answer clearly, we are not ready to talk about how.
The three-year-old was onto something. The question was never the problem. The problem was that we stopped asking it.