She Never Stopped Being the Kid Who Asked Why

On curiosity, the scientific method, and what it actually looks like to test your way through a business problem.

buildwithmatriarch.com

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Nelle was one of those children. The ones who ask why until the adults in the room run out of answers and resort to because I said so. She is still that child. She has simply found a professional context in which it is an asset.

“That’s how I’ve always thought,” she says of the approach she now applies to business advisory. “Leading with the curiosity. I was totally one of those ‘why’ kids.” Whether it is a function of being neurodivergent — something she references without elaboration, as simple fact — or something else, she has never had a natural inclination toward pattern-matching as a substitute for actual inquiry. When she looks at a business problem, she wants to know what is actually true in this specific situation, not what worked for someone else.

The method she has developed from this — or perhaps always had, without naming it — maps closely onto the scientific method. Define the problem. Gather existing data. Research what is already known. Hypothesise a solution. Test it. Gather new data. Repeat.

This sounds straightforward. In practice, applied to the daily uncertainty of running a small business, it requires something most frameworks do not ask for: the willingness to sit with a result you did not want and read it as information rather than verdict.

Take silence. An offer goes out. Nobody buys. The feeling, she acknowledges, is rejection. The method demands something different — locating the silence, finding the point in the communication where the exchange broke down, forming a hypothesis about why, and testing the hypothesis. The feeling and the method are not in conflict. You are allowed to feel the rejection. You are also required to keep working.

“Feelings and thoughts are all transient things flowing through us,” she says. “We don’t have to invest in them. We can just observe them.” She stops herself here, noting that this is edging toward therapy territory rather than business advisory — but she does not pretend the two do not meet. The ability to observe a feeling without being captured by it is, in her framework, a business skill. It is what allows the method to function when the data is uncomfortable.

The curiosity-first approach is not without its friction. Nelle attracts clients who do not want easy answers — she thinks this is probably self-selecting, that people who want to be told what to do find their way elsewhere. But even within her client base, she has learned to manage the pace of her own thinking. “Sometimes clients can take their time getting back to me if I get excited and ask too many questions at once,” she says. “I’m learning how to match their pace though.”

This tension — between a mind that moves fast and clients who need space to think — is part of what shaped the delivery format she uses. The Trello board, the asynchronous exchange, the written conversation rather than the phone call: these are not only practical accommodations for a solo operator working across time zones. They are a container built for the gap between her pace and theirs.

She describes this as a curb cut effect. A design principle borrowed from urban accessibility: the kerb cut on a pavement was built for wheelchair users, but it turns out to be useful for everyone — people with prams, delivery workers, cyclists. Nelle built her advisory format for her own processing needs. She needs time to think before she responds. She does not want to perform real-time certainty she does not have. Asynchronous delivery was the solution.

But the format also turned out to serve people she had not originally designed for. Not just other neurodivergent thinkers, but people in different time zones, people working around children, people who, in her phrase, are allergic to the phone. A format built for access turned out to be the format most of her clients actually needed.

The why kid did not stop asking why when she grew up. She built a business method from the question, and then built a delivery format that lets both her and her clients think before they answer.

The results, she would tell you, are the data. The method continues.

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