The Power of Why
(Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash)
I'm currently studying for the ECBA (Entry Certificate in Business Analysis) certificate. One of the first lessons I learned was the power of one simple word: "Why?"
- “Why do we do it this way?”
- “Why is this process so painful?”
- “Why does this matter to the customer?”
- “Why now?”
"Just one word? Really?" you may ask. Yes, really. Just hear me out!
People sometimes think business analysis is all about diagrams, workflows, and documentation. Those things matter, of course, but they’re not what make an analyst effective. The real engine behind good analysis is curiosity. Curiosity keeps you from taking the CEO's demand for a new custom app to improve customer service at face value and wasting thousands of dollars in development fees to then discover the company just needed to hire more customer representatives. It’s helps you dig deeper and uncover the real reason why someone is demanding something to be bought or why the finance department follows the same old approval process they've been following for the last five years.
When you approach a project with genuine curiosity, you stop seeing requirements as a checklist and more like a mystery to solve. You begin to see how people, processes, and technology intertwine. You also start to see how small changes ripple across the system in unexpected ways.
Asking "what" gives you the facts": "We've generated that report every Friday for the last 5 years."
However, asking “why” will reveal the reason: “Because five years ago, an executive boss that left the company three years ago needed it for a weekly meeting that doesn’t even happen anymore.”
That’s the magic of “why.” It exposes hidden assumptions, outdated routines, and decisions that no one remembers making but everyone still follows. It’s how you find the buried value in an organization.
Of course, asking “why” is an art form. You can’t just walk into a meeting and repeat it five times in a row, even if sometimes you really really want to. The trick is to find different ways to reword your curiosity so it doesn't feel confrontation or repetitive:
- “Help me understand how that decision came about.”
- “What would happen if we didn’t do this step?”
- “Who benefits most from this process?”
You’re still asking “why,” but in a way that invites people to think with you, instead of feeling like they’re being interrogated.
A business analyst can map processes and write requirements all day long, but without that magic word, you’re just describing the surface. Curiosity and the power of "why" can help pull you deeper, past symptoms, assumptions, and noise, until you reach the real insight hiding underneath.
That’s why I think “why” is the most powerful word in a business analyst’s toolkit. It challenges complacency. It sparks clarity. It connects dots no one else noticed. And most importantly, it keeps the work interesting.
That’s what The Curious BA is about: staying relentlessly curious about how people, systems, and ideas connect. Because the more we ask “why,” the better our businesses, our projects, and our thinking become.