Before Your WHY Comes Your VIEW

(or reflections on week 1)

I have often heard gurus advise that you should start with WHY.

Why are you motivated to act? Your WHY is the passion that drives WHAT you do and defines HOW you do it.

Starting with WHY sounds right. After all, what you develop—the product, intervention or solution—may change as you learn. You may test, adapt and pivot. But your motivation, purpose and passion—your WHY—should remain the same.

Right?

In an age of narcissistic hyper-individualism, it makes sense that we would begin by focusing on ourselves. You cannot go wrong by starting with yourself.

Right?

Maybe.

Your WHY is not the only thing at the core of how you approach a problem or separate what matters from the noise. Behind your WHY is your VIEW: your point of view, perspective and mindset.

Your VIEW shapes how you see the world, how you understand your place within it and, ultimately, how you define your WHY.

So, what happens when you declare your WHY before examining the VIEW behind it?

You risk locking yourself into defending it.

Before committing to your WHY, you need to recognize and begin unlearning the patterned assumptions through which you interpret the world. You need to question the biases you might otherwise accept unconsciously. You need practices that require you to reassess what you believe and repeatedly reality-check your assumptions against evidence and the perspectives of others.

Otherwise, you have already decided what drives you, how you perceive the world and what your place in it should be. Everything that follows can then become evidence for the answer you have already chosen.

Data that contradicts you? You find a reason to dismiss it.

Someone who disagrees? You try to convince them instead of listening to what they see.

An experience that should change your thinking? You explain it away.

You are not thinking anymore. You are proving.

The Real Trap

I see this happen all the time with people building new things. They arrive with their idea and their WHY fully formed:

“I’m doing this because…”

Great. Now what?

Everything that follows can become an exercise in making that WHY look true.

That is not innovation. It is narrative construction.

The participants who completed the Perspectives session in the HIP Dev Challenge experienced something different. They spent time on what most people skip: identifying the patterned assumptions shaping their thinking and separating what they actually know from what they merely assume.

This is harder than it sounds.

When Lindokuhle Mudzipuri began, she had a WHY, like everyone else. But when she stopped to examine the VIEW behind it, her framing shifted.

Instead of:

“I need to prove this works.”

It became:

“I need to understand whether my understanding is accurate.”

That one shift changes everything: how you listen, what you notice and whether you are capable of learning something that could change your mind.

Separating what you know from what you assume sounds simple. It is not.

We all carry assumptions that we have gradually come to treat as facts. We all develop patterned ways of interpreting what we encounter. Until we make those patterns explicit, we cannot reliably distinguish what reality is telling us from what we already expect to find.

Philisiwe Mcanda identified a specific habit that interferes with her thinking: rushing towards certainty before she has enough information.

That impulse—the need to know, to have an answer, to declare the WHY—is what can kill new insights, things that don’t fit your VIEW or your WHY. The moment you feel certain is often the moment you stop asking questions.

What Happens When You Reverse the Order?

Instead of:

Declare your WHY → Defend it

Try:

Examine your VIEW → Challenge your assumptions → Establish your WHY

Examining your VIEW means asking:

• What do I actually know?
• What am I assuming?
• Which biases might I be accepting without recognizing them?
• What have I not asked?
• What would change my mind?
• Who am I not listening to?
• How will I catch myself when I begin defending rather than learning?

Do that work first. Stay with the uncertainty. Do not rush towards certainty simply because certainty feels more comfortable.

Then allow your WHY to emerge. It may be different from what you expected. More importantly, it will be grounded in something more than personal conviction; and it will be grounded in something more than certainty–a conviction to question, to embrace uncertainty, to push your boundaries and always question your understandings.

That is also the purpose of a Personal Charter. It is not simply a statement of what you believe. It is a commitment to how you will keep questioning what you believe.

Desire Diafouana and Noxolo Vivienne Sekhobo both built checks into their Personal Charters to help them recognize when they are simply confirming what they already believe. Their Charters commit them to questioning, reassessment and continual reality checks—the practices that keep learning from becoming defence.

Simon Ernest put it directly: when evidence contradicts what you believe, that is not failure. It is information.

That is where learning happens—but only if you have not locked yourself into defending your original position.

Jackson Njonde and Ipfilawe Golden Tshitangano both committed to listening: not waiting for their turn to speak, not redirecting the conversation towards their own point, but listening to what is actually being said.

Listening is how you discover what you did not know.

Why This Matters for Your Work

If you are building something new—a project, a product, an intervention or anything else that matters—do not begin by treating your WHY as unquestionable.

Start by examining the VIEW through which you understand yourself and the world around you.

Identify the assumptions that have become automatic. Question the biases you might otherwise accept without noticing. Look for the places where you are assuming rather than knowing. Listen to people who see the situation differently and allow what you hear to change how you understand it.

Write down what changes.

Then create a Personal Charter that keeps you doing this work—not once, but throughout the life of your project. Commit to the questions you will continue asking, the evidence you will seek and the reality checks you will use when certainty begins to replace curiosity.

Your WHY will emerge. When it does, it will not simply be decoration added to your project. It will be grounded in how you have learned to see—and disciplined by your willingness to keep looking again.

The participants in Perspectives did not simply learn “how to think.” They began identifying the patterned assumptions shaping their thinking, questioning the biases they might otherwise accept unconsciously, and creating Personal Charters that keep their beliefs open to evidence, reassessment and correction.

They came expecting to work on their ideas, ventures and solutions.

Instead, they encountered something more fundamental:

Your ideas are only as good as the assumptions beneath them.

Innovation begins when you become willing to expose those assumptions to reality—and allow reality to change your mind. It doesn’t guarantee success, but it certainly improves your chances!

The people doing genuinely innovative work are not necessarily those who are most certain about their WHY. They are the ones who continue asking questions, searching for what they may have misunderstood and allowing evidence and other people to change their minds.

This is not weakness. It’s active listening, critical thinking; life-long learning. It’s the only way to survive and a rapidly changing reality.