"The Business Wants X"

From Coordination to Collaboration

"The Business Wants X."

Whenever this sentence is dropped in a conversation, it’s usually followed by a short period of silence.

After the pause, the conversation usually picks up again. What the business wants is taken as a given. After all, we are eager to give the business what they want. The people in the meeting room often immediately jump into action. What can we do to please the business?

Especially in organizations where IT is considered a cost center, and there are many departments that have to coordinate for something to succeed, you will hear the magic phrase “The Business Wants” frequently uttered by someone.

There are three primary problems with using this expression.

1. Talking about the business like it's something else we're not a part of. We’re all part of the business, and it’s not some magic place where only certain privileged business people belong. No business means we all won’t keep our jobs.

2. What the business asks is rarely what they really want to have, but we won’t know unless we ask. We’re settling for merely giving people a proxy of what the business really wants.

3. It absolves us from responsibility and ownership over the results of what the business wants. We’re responsible for giving the business what they are asking for and that’s where our responsibility ends.

"People don't want a quarter-inch dril, they want a quarter inch-hole".

- Professor Theodore Levitt

The business doesn't even want that hole. They want what the hole makes possible, and then they want to preferably make money what they’re making possible too. They want value creation and value capture.

Whenever you hear, "The business wants X", consider that as a proxy that may be a poor substitute for what they really want. What they really want is usually anchored in something else. Unless you talk about something else, you can't give them what they really want, which is results.

The hard part is to ask questions with intent curiosity and without judgement. Try to understand what they really want, and watch out when you ask why as that can quickly make people defensive.

And when you understand that something else, it's never the business wants, it’s we want or the customer wants, because who the request comes from doesn’t really matter. It’s the ultimate want, need, problem, struggle, or jobs-to-be-done we’re trying to resolve.

In short, the business usually doesn’t want what it asks for, but what it asks for will make it possible. That’s what we should be talking about. We should all want results and understand why they matter. Instead of coordinating what the business wants, try collaborating on what we’re trying to make possible.

Unless we shift the conversation from coordination to collaboration, we can only give the business what it asked for, which might not be what they really want.