Starting a new job is always interesting because you walk into systems and processes that existed long before you got there, but that maybe aren’t as clear as people who have been doing them assume. People have their own routines, workarounds, habits, and assumptions. Some of them make perfect sense. Some of them probably made sense five years ago.
I just started a new job, and right now, a lot of what I’m doing is less “fixing things” and more trying to understand how things actually work.
That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly difficult in a lot of businesses.
Information gets scattered everywhere. Some of it lives in ERP systems. Some in spreadsheets. Some in Outlook inboxes. Some only exist in someone’s head because they’ve done the same task for ten years and nobody ever documented it.
So I’ve been falling back on a pretty basic framework:
Who?
What?
When?
Where?
Why?
How?
Simple questions, but they cut through a lot of noise.
Who actually handles this?
What is the real process, not the official one? (If an “official” one exists)
When does this happen?
Where does the information live?
Why is it done this way?
How does it move from beginning to end?
The funny thing is that most operational confusion starts showing up almost immediately once you start asking these questions consistently.
Sometimes, nobody really owns a process. Sometimes three people think they own it. Sometimes the “why” disappeared years ago, but everybody kept doing it because nobody wanted to touch it. Sometimes the process itself works fine, but the information around it is nearly impossible to track down later.
I think there’s a tendency in a lot of workplaces to jump straight into solutions mode. New software. New dashboards. New automation. Everybody wants optimization.
But if you don’t understand the current state clearly, you’re basically building on top of fog.
Honestly, I don’t even think this applies only to work. A lot of communication problems in general come from people skipping steps in these questions. People mix facts with assumptions. They explain conclusions without explaining context. They talk about what happened without talking about why.
The basics matter more than people think.
Not everything needs a revolutionary framework. Sometimes you just need to slow down enough to ask better questions and document the answers clearly.
That alone gets you further than most people realize.