Decision Advantage Starts with a Simple Question: Why?

Why “Why”? The word is the bane of many a parent. But somehow children instinctively understand the power of asking, “Why?” It’s a potent tool for understanding the world around us, though we seem to lose appreciation for it over time. In the military context, Sun Tzu exhorts warriors to “know the enemy and know yourself” so that “you may make your victory complete.”

Organizations follow this principle by pursuing development of a common operational picture (COP) to provide them with situational awareness (SA). With the display projected on the wall of the operations center, organizations can then be proud of the decision aid they’ve created.

To be truly impactful, though, decision aids need to actually aid decision-making. But how many COP or data-visualization projects start out by asking, “What decisions do we need to make? What information do we need to make those decisions, where do those data reside, and how do we interact with the data most effectively?” Pretty straightforward, right?

So why is this so hard? Don’t feel bad; human nature is to blame. Because people tend to think and communicate first about the clearest elements, we tend to focus on the “What,” which is the most accessible and easily grasped. Sometimes we don’t get to “How,” and we often never get to the “Why.”

Visionary thinker Simon Sinek developed a model showing how inspired leaders and organizations think, act, and communicate from the inside out. They start with “Why” in the center, and then in concentric circles, ask “How” and then “What.” This helps them ponder such questions as, “Why do we exist? How do we fulfill this mission? What do we do to generate the outcomes we seek?” The questions progress from the more abstract to the more concrete, tangible, and understandable.

Military communicators have long striven to deliver “the right information in the right place at the right time”… but how do we know what the right information is? We start with “Why!” In order for technologists to deliver truly impactful solutions, they must start with a decidedly nontechnical approach: analyze the organization’s mission and from that, map out the decisions a unit or a commander needs to make. That knowledge may be found in administrative instruction, mission directives, or even operational orders, and it should be refined through interviewing key mission stakeholders up, down, and across echelons.

Further decomposition will then lead to understanding what information technologists need to make those decisions, and identifying the authoritative sources of data that will generate that information. The technologists can then create the connections to those data sources, build the interfaces to facilitate data sharing, and apply the data science skills to ingest, analyze, and present that data.

This hybrid, inside-out approach is where the magic lies. Tapping into our inner toddler to ask, “Why?” is the key to creating impactful, data-driven solutions that drive decision advantage.