One of the harder things for me to explain about how I work is that I often find myself trying to answer a question nobody actually asked.
Sometimes that is helpful. Sometimes I am sure it can be frustrating for the people around me. A request may sound fairly simple, and instead of immediately doing what was requested, I start asking questions about why we need it, what we are hoping to learn, and what we are going to do with the answer.
I am not trying to make the work more complicated. Usually, I am trying to make sure we are solving the right problem in the most efficient way possible.
A few years ago, I noticed something that did not quite make sense with our football attendance. Our ticket distribution numbers looked respectable, but the crowd in the stadium did not always feel like it matched those numbers.
The most obvious conclusion would have been that we needed to sell or distribute more tickets. That may have helped, but I was not convinced it explained what I was seeing. Before we focused only on getting more tickets into people's hands, I wanted to understand what was happening with the tickets we had already distributed.
I created a report that separated several of our major ticket groups. I compared season-ticket holders, sponsors, complimentary tickets, team tickets, and tickets that had gone through brokers. The goal was to see which groups were actually using their tickets and which groups had the largest number of unused seats.
What we found shaped how I thought about the problem.
Sponsors and complimentary tickets were among the groups leaving the most tickets unused. At the same time, tickets that had gone through a broker were being scanned at a relatively high rate.
That did not mean brokers were automatically the answer or that sponsor and complimentary tickets had no value. There are a lot of outside factors involved, and attendance is never controlled by one decision. But the report gave us a better understanding of where some of the empty seats were coming from.
It helped support a different approach with sponsors. Instead of assuming that more tickets always created more value, we could look at offering fewer tickets in better locations or more premium areas. It also made us more intentional about complimentary tickets. Giving a ticket away did not accomplish much if the ticket was unlikely to be used.
The broker results challenged some of our assumptions, too. There can be understandable hesitation about putting more inventory into the secondary market. But if those tickets were reaching people who actually came to the game, that mattered. It showed us that working with a broker could be one useful outlet for getting tickets into the hands of people who intended to use them.
The first question was probably something like, "How do we get more people into the stadium?"
That was a real question. It was also too broad to tell us what we should do next.
The more useful question was, "What is happening to the tickets we have already distributed?"
Once we asked that question, we had something we could investigate. We could identify patterns, challenge assumptions, and make more informed decisions about where our ticket inventory was going.
I have found myself taking a similar approach in other areas of my work.
Someone may ask for a report, but the important question is what decision the report is supposed to help them make. We may decide that a webpage needs more information, only to realize that the larger problem is how difficult it is for a fan to find the information in the first place. We may believe we need another email campaign when the real issue is that the offer or the audience has not been clearly defined or the targeted segment is too broad.
That does not mean every request needs to become a major investigation. There is a point where asking more questions can become an excuse not to act. Sometimes the requested report really is the right report. Sometimes the page simply needs to be fixed. Sometimes the email needs to be sent.
The challenge is knowing when the request is clear enough to act on and when something underneath it still does not make sense.
I do not have a formal process for figuring that out. Most of the questions I ask are fairly ordinary.
- What changed?
- Who is experiencing the problem?
- What are we assuming is true?
- What decision are we trying to make?
- What would still be broken if we completed the request exactly as it was given to us?
That last question is usually the one that helps me the most. It forces me to imagine that we did everything requested and did it well. If the underlying problem would still be there, then the work may be useful, but it is probably not enough.
For what it is worth, this way of thinking does not always lead to a dramatic discovery. Sometimes it simply gives us more confidence that we are headed in the right direction. Other times, it changes the work completely.
I think the important part is being willing to admit that the first version of a problem may be incomplete. The person asking the question may not have all the information yet. The person receiving it may be carrying assumptions of their own. The numbers may be accurate but still fail to explain what people are actually experiencing.
That is why I sometimes hesitate before immediately answering the question in front of me.
It is not because the first question is wrong.
It is because there may be a more useful question hiding behind it.