What for? How does it Matter?

I was chatting with a friend of mine who was in a senior leadership position.   He wanted to implement a relocation strategy and he mentioned that based on his intuition all the processes should move into a particular country.

As a Six Sigma professional, I asked him whether he knew why the processes where they were today.  His answer: What for?  How does it matter?

I was taken aback and puzzled by the question and I remained speechless.  Not because I did not know but the questions were bizarre.  

I kept quiet and looked around.  And suddenly I started having a headache.

My first reaction was to go back to what I did in the past.  Did I eat?  Did I have too many drinks last night? Did I sleep well last night?

Then, I thought that I only caught 2 hours of sleep.  And I decided that I should head home for a nap and my headache would subside (if that was the cause).

This thought process is present in every aspects of our life.  And I would even go on to say that it is fundamental to our knowledge and our learning and to progress in technology and mankind.   Imagine a world where we are cut off from the past experience or we do not understand our past and do not learn from our mistakes. 

In fact, we are what we are today because of our past.  And failure to understand the past will not help us understand who we are today.  Fair enough, knowing the past is not crystal ball gazing for our future for sure, but equips ourselves well with tools to ensure that we do not repeat the same mistakes – And why we say learning from mistakes?   And practice makes perfect?

And knowing the past is fundamental in Six Sigma discipline.  As a Six Sigma professional, I would look at control charts, identifying special and common causes, which then would lead me to determine the type of actions/solutions to be adopted to address the issues.  And how about the 5-whys?  And I can name a whole list of tools which look at the past and synthesize with the trends to identify potential impact to our solutions.

I kept quiet and I wished my friend good luck.  The last I heard, the project is not taking a good shape.  People are demoralised; there are no clear directions; costs have escalated and what happened to be one country solution is looking at many country solutions with the deadline fast approaching.