Watch out for the Choke Levers | Working Principles

I’m showing my age in this post. If you are younger than 30 you probably have no idea what I am talking about.

Do you remember having a choke lever in your car? Do you still look for it in your current car? When was the last time you gave a thought to the fuel mix going to your engine? If it was recently, I suspect it was because you were driving a vintage vehicle, or more likely a petrol lawnmower, or generator. If you don’t know what a chuck lever is/was then here’s a quick overview: What is a choke and what does it do?

My last car had an automatic handbrake, it took me a while before I trusted it. When I got a new car without it, I had to relearn the process.

There’s a quote that is regularly attributed to Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Many of the projects that I work on are changing things for people and often those project starts with a phase called “requirements gathering”, or sometimes refered to as “user needs.”

I find this phase fascinating for many reasons, one of the main ones being the process of looking for the “choke levers.” People tend to state their requirement in the terms of what they currently do and the tools that they use. This isn’t surprising it’s what they spend much of their day doing and most of them aren’t being paid to think outside of the framework into which they have been fixed.

We aren’t so good at abstracting our requirements into actual needs.

Let me explain using the Choke Lever as my example.

Take this as a pProblem statement: “The Choke Lever is difficult to pull out.” This may well result in a requirement of “A Choke Lever that is easy to pull out.”

With the privilege hindsight you look on these and smile. You know that the answer to the problem isn’t an “Easy Pull Choke Lever.”

What went wrong here? Was the problem statement wrong, or the requirement? Neither is particularly wrong, it’s just that they both failed to go far enough, they both focussed on the Choke Lever. The problem and the need were constrained by the current framework, neither saw beyond the Choke Lever, neither saw beyond the need for faster horses.

Knowing what we now know we can draw out a far more sophisticated set of needs for the Choke Lever problem. We can see that the higher level need is to “start the engine”, and that in order to start the engine we need to “change the mix of fuel and air into the engine” and all of the associated needs like “adjust the mix back once the engine is warm.” A whole set of needs that gave us automatic chokes and computerised engine management systems.

But wait even these more sophisticated definitions of need are subject to the framing of “the engine.” Why do you need an engine? What about electric vehicles. I don’t need to start the engine in my electric lawnmower.

When we ask people about their requirements we need to recognise that they will communicate the problem they see before them and there are times that we need to help them to see beyond the frame and reach for a better outcome.

Header Image: This is the view from Edinburgh Castle on a late summer, early Autumnal day.