Why? It's Elementary!

In elementary school my teachers thought I was “slow”. They even expressed their concern to my parents. Their belief was based on my progress on “learning” the material being slower than my peers. The year after they voiced their concern (4th grade), I took a standardized test, which was the first grade they offered such a test. Until that time everything was based on the teachers’ perceptions. So, you can imagine everyone’s surprise and my parents’ relief when the standardized test showed I was average, to slightly above average in every category except math and science. I was 3 grades ahead in math and well above average in science. How did everyone get it so wrong?

Several years ago, I was helping my daughter with her math homework when she started arguing with me that I was “telling her the wrong way to do it”. I asked her to explain what the teacher told her to do. What she explained to me was how they “needed” to get the equation into a certain form first and then follow the procedure to solve it. In order to get the equation into the “correct” format she would have to add several unnecessary steps to the process. When I explained the reason for each step, her eyes lit up. She said “oooooh, that makes sense. Before I didn’t know why we were doing it, just that we had to follow the procedure” (I think I paraphrased that a bit).

While working as an engineer, I actually heard the classic saying, “because that’s how we’ve always done it”. That saying has always made me cringe. I understand the need for process control to ensure certain quality standards. On the other hand, a well-defined process that is to be used repeatedly is the same as saying “that’s how we’ve always done it, and we will do it that way in the future”.

So, how are these 3 stories related? Let me start from the beginning. Most of what was taught in the lower grades when I was young was based on rote memorization. If the student hadn’t memorized the question and corresponding answer, then they didn’t know how to solve for the answer. Therefore, I wasn’t slow. I was learning WHY things were done a certain way. This took longer but gave me a better grasp on how to solve problems I hadn’t seen before. At the time, I didn’t realize I was looking at things differently. My daughter’s experience was an eye-opener. I realized nothing had changed, in fact I think it had gotten worse. As an engineer I have seen the negative effects of teaching people WHAT to do rather than WHY they are doing it. Unfortunately, most people have been conditioned to do WHAT they are told and not ask WHY they are doing it. It’s not that they don’t want to know why. In my experience most do.

My final points here. Knowledge doesn’t expand if it only provides known answers to known problems. Knowledge expands by understanding WHY an answer is valid and then applying the logic to problems with unknown solutions. By expansion, innovation provides no value if it only answers WHAT you created. The value is in answering WHY. This isn’t meant to be a plug but, I believe this is the reason Agile implementations are so effective. They encourage people to ask WHY.