WTF
I was recently at dinner with a dear friend who went independent after a decade of working in a consultancy. One day a while back, the consultancy got a new CEO. For their first few months, the CEO would walk around with two notebooks. One was the regular ol’ black notebook that you expect every knowledge worker to have. The other was red, and it had the letters WTF written on the front.
Every time the CEO heard something that sounded absurd or horrible to them, they would put their regular notebook away and write it down in the WTF notebook. As you would expect, being the CEO of a new-to-them company, they rapidly filled the notebook.
I think of this often as a consultant. I am frequently called to be present in WTF situations. Some are obvious, but most are not, or they would have been addressed without me in the room, right? It’s incumbent on me to figure out the real reasons I’m hired, which are frequently subtle, requiring some digging. You ask questions, poke around corners, pull on threads, and find an expensive WTF.
Dan Luu’s immortal, essential “Normalization of deviance”, a URL I have memorized, speaks to this issue:
It's sort of funny that this ends up being a problem about incentives. As an industry, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize consumers into doing what we want. But then we set up incentive systems that are generally agreed upon as incentivizing us to do the wrong things, and we do so via a combination of a game of telephone and cargo cult diffusion.
I’m sure you encounter WTF moments, too. You encounter them when you start a new job, when coworkers join your team, when you step back and realize how messed up everything is. You encounter them when the world slowly backslides into a growth-hacked psychospiritual apocalypse. You encounter them when you have to call your bank. You encounter them when you check the news every morning. We are in a very large WTF moment, collectively, and the nature of each WTF is systemic, requiring deep inquiry.
Perhaps recent events in your life have caused you to say “WTF” at some point. If so, I have a little gift for you. I worked out four questions that show up for me in the increasingly frequent WTF moments in my own life:
- What is happening? Describe it as neutrally as possible, like one of those reporters who spent a decade abetting fascism by avoiding value judgments.
- Why is it causing you to WTF? Now move into your value judgment. This is the therapy part, the integrity part, the part when you say that something is obviously bad, will result in active harm, etc.
- What’s preferable, instead? Think about what a better course of action would be. What did you expect to see happen? Keep it factual here; your opinions are for the next question.
- What would the impact of that be? If everything you just described in #3 became reality, what do you think would happen?
Keep it simple. Write like you’re creating a north star for yourself, something you can follow within the WTF & outside of it. The challenges are usually bigger than you think, and they usually come down to incentives, just as Donella Meadows told us.
That’s why I recommend waiting a day between answering #2 & #3. Doing so helps your brain settle down, so you can answer from a less activated space. That results in a better answer!
You may download the template here. The first page is for a full sheet. The second page is for a two-up landscape sheet, suitable for printing duplex on the short edge & folding into a zine.
If you like this, let us know and I’ll be happy to print some notebooks – with red covers, of course.
And one last thing: I bought a red WTF notebook of my own. So if you’re an active client and you ever see me holding a red notebook, be grateful that I’m about to earn my fees.