Asking Why?

I've been thinking lately about how frequently (or infrequently) we ask why? That is, I think maybe we don't do it often enough. 

Today in standup there was a question about adding some markers to cards to indicate something or other. I finally remembered to ask "Why?". The answer was clear enough, so we'd have some big-visible reminder of something, but only the requester had a feeling that that would be useful and he wasn't really committed to it.

If we had stopped and discussed the merits of the proposed change, then gone about making that change, and spent time over the next week or two reminding ourselves of this process change it would have been a bit wasteful. Wasteful because nobody really saw the benefit of doing it. One person even suggested it was redundant because the same answer was inferred by other data that we already track. 

Asking "Why?" can save you some unnecessary work.