Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness--and a New Freedom--at Work

by Bill Burnett

He’s something of a pro at situation analysis, and over the years he’s developed a very sophisticated approach to this part of his practice. He’s boiled the process down to asking just two questions: Expert Consultant Dave Question #1: What’s going on? (Then he listens to the very long answer the client gives him, he takes a thoughtful pause, and then he asks the second question.) Expert Consultant Dave Question #2: Okay. Now, what’s really going on? That’s it. Really. In any situation where people are stuck and stress abounds, it’s not hard to get an answer to Question number 1, and it’s exactly the right place to start. Dave would just ask it and start taking notes. After three or five or forty-five minutes of listening to the answer, Dave would move on to the really strategic part of his analysis by asking the insightfully penetrating follow-up question: Now, what’s really going on? That has been Dave’s number 2 investigative question for decades, and it works about 95 percent of the time in getting to the bottom of the real problem in very short order. In most situations, there’s what psychologists like to describe as the presenting situation and then there’s the underlying situation. Question number 1 gets at the presenting situation and Question number 2 gets at the underlying situation.