Business Question to Human Question

Sudden Compass®
Putting customer centricity into practice

Business Question to Human Question, is a technique developed by Sudden Compass® for leveling up business-centric questions to discover new and previously unseen opportunities to understand and meet customer needs. It provides individuals and teams with a rapid, hands-on way to break out of company-centric habits and cultivate true customer centricity.

Business questions are the kinds of questions typically discussed and debated in meetings and boardrooms worldwide, such as “How can we sell more laundry detergent in urban areas of the US?” or, “How do we increase the margins of our new financial services offering?” Business questions often share the following characteristics:

  • Aimed towards achieving a financial or operational outcome for the business
  • Centered around a particular company goal or metric (such as growth or revenue)
  • Includes company and/or business jargon, often to the point of being unclear or confusing to a general audience

Human questions are the higher-level questions that we must answer to actually deliver new and meaningful solutions to our customers, such as “How do people do their laundry in cities?” or, “What makes people feel financially secure?” Human questions often share the following characteristics:

  • Aimed towards better understanding a set of current or prospective customers
  • Does not include any references to company goals or metrics
  • Would be comprehensible to a general audience

For example, the business question, “How do we drive more top-tier subscriptions to our music streaming service?” could be reframed as human questions such as, “How do people listen to music?”, “What value do people derive from listening to music?” or even, “How do people determine the value of intangible things?” Each of these human questions could lead to transformative insights that would have been lost to narrower, more business-centric questions.

By reframing business questions as human questions, teams are able to better empathize with and understand current and prospective customers, and ultimately uncover new and previously unseen ways to meet those customers’ needs. It also allows for teams to actively negotiate the needs of the business and the customers, and to find a meeting point that generates shared value for both sides.

Though reframing a business question as a human question can be done at an individual level, this method is most powerful when it is done as a group, harnessing multiple perspectives. The steps outlined below describe how a small team (ideally, 2-5 people) can work together to generate a broad set of potential human questions based on a single business question.

Business Question to Human question is utilized as a method in the first step (Ask) of Sudden Compass’s Unlock Sprints™ practice (Ask, Acquire, Analyze, Act). By starting with the business question, the sprint is set up to stay close to the business's needs through each subsequent step, while leaving room to explore new customer-centric solutions.

STATS
Time
20 mins
Activity
Group
Sprint Type
All

Directions

  1. Begin by aligning on a mission-critical business question that is relevant and important to the assembled group. For example, “How do we increase the sale of our product in Q1?” or “How do we expand into a new market?” Write the business question on a sticky note and place it in a shared, visible space, such as the wall or a whiteboard.
  2. Working individually and using sticky notes, spend 5 minutes writing out as many human questions as you can, one sticky note per human question.
  3. Allow each participant to place their human question post-it notes one by one in a shared, centralized location such as a whiteboard, reading each one aloud as they go. Similar or identical human questions can be clustered together.
  4. Using a decision-making method such as dot voting, identify an ordered set of human questions that participants believe is most likely to uncover something genuinely new and previously unknown or poorly understood.
  5. Commit to a single human question as a starting point, and co-create a time-boxed plan to answer this question to the best of the group’s ability. Use the Integrated Data Thinking™ method to identify appropriate research methodologies for the human question at hand.