Harvard Business Review’s 5 Questions vs. The 6-Steps
Last week, someone sent me the following Harvard Business Review (HBR) article https://hbr.org/2024/05/the-art-of-asking-smarter-questions, asking about the similarities between the articles 5 smarter questions to ask, in comparison to the 6 steps to applied intelligence process — 6ai.
The Art of Asking Smarter Questions, These Five Techniques Can Drive Great Strategic Decision-making, by Arnaud Chevallier, Frederic Dalsace, and Jean-Louis Barsoux. Contents that, by attending to these five questions, “one is more likely to cover all the areas that need to be explored.” This a pretty strong statement in the information age particularly for a very manual theoretical-based process.
In brief, the authors propose 5 types of smart questions to be asked during the strategic decision-making process: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. These five techniques are said to be able to drive “great strategic decision-making,” particularly in a world where organizations are facing increased urgency and unpredictability. The article also says that business professionals are not formally trained to ask good questions, so these 5 structured questions can be effective in building strategies for organizations of all types.
It is important to note that the authors also reveal that in their experiences as consultants, they have found many of these questions to have gained resonance across the business world, and that their three-year research project was built primarily on asking executives to brainstorm these questions.
“In our research and consulting over the past decade[…]in a three-year project we asked executives to question-storm about the decisions they’ve faced and the kinds of inquiry they’ve pursued.”
Not exactly the most authentic real-life business scenario approach, there is no substitute for gathering data through actual events. Therefore, this is where the article’s premise and logic begin to fall apart. To begin with, and the most obvious is the methodology relies too heavily on executives being surveyed in a controlled situation. Data was not gathered in actual strategy meetings and then used to have discussions with leaders about the better questions they could’ve asked scenario. Further, it would’ve been helpful to understand the environment, pressures, circumstances and dynamics at play that led or prevented them from asking better questions. Secondly, the top-down hierarchical approach still exists — whereby only the leaders are framing and asking the questions. This directly contradicts what the authors later say throughout the article, about organizations should avoid only executives asking all the important questions.
“We created a tool to help people assess their questioning styles and gave it to 1,200 global executives.” Again, this is a major contradiction as many successful growth businesses are bottom-up-driven.
The article goes on to be highly selective and cherry-picks the examples that support their theory best — subjective and unscientific and very typical of consulting culture. Consultants say a whole lot, charge a whole lot, but provide clients with nothing they don’t already know themselves. It’s like borrowing someone’s watch to tell them the time.
The consulting industry has entrenched itself in the management of private businesses, organizations and governments around the world, says Professor Mariana Mazzucato, author of THE BIG CON, How The Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Wraps Our Economies. And it serves neither citizens nor consumers and producers. Instead many economies have become dependent on consulting firms to make decisions, Prof. Mazzucato explains in her book.
Consultants in many ways stunt innovation and creativity, and obfuscate corporate political accountability. The overuse of consultancies has gradually weakened organizations, making them more reliant on contracting out, instead of doing it themselves internally.
The consultant ends up creating complexity where none exists, in efforts to create the perception of value for themselves and to justify their exorbitant fees. Academics too are being used to come up with mumbo jumbo academic management research papers, like this one, underpinning the consulting sham. Many straddle being consultants and academics simultaneously.
However, given the existence of big data, data science and AI, this manual one-dimensional 5 questions approach, is essentially going backwards. In an AI-driven world intelligent technology is available to develop strategy more scientifically, more robust and efficient processes. The five smart questions approach is fragile, the use of machine-led intelligent ecosystems is antifragile. We can harness machine intelligence and be more exhaustive, and more precise and do so with an enormous amount of speed.
So it makes no sense to go backwards with manual and outside consulting contracting when with a little effort and computational assistance, people can do it themselves.
So we can use the awesome computational power of machines for the heavy information grinding. Furthermore, the top-down process used by consulting has long been proven counterintuitive and counterproductive, and just plain wrong. PowerPoint slides are not a thing anymore. The bottom-up process, instead, is the most proven objective process, where development processes can utilize data science eco-systems and AI, for more capacity building and range in capturing significantly more variables to add to the decisioning equation.
The 6ai process, therefore, is an inherently bottom-up process that utilizes SaaS-based software, putting the user through a series (6 steps) of processes to better solve problems via the scientific method.
The First step is Identifying the Problem, which requires data sourcing and aggregation. Second, is Framing the Strategic Question, requiring generating insights and targets. Third, Idea Generation, for strategy and planning. Fourth, Finding the Objective Truth, which centres around data quality control, i.e., garbage in garbage out. The fifth, Execution, and the Sixth and final step is Iteration and Testing.
The 6-step process, therefore, is robust and antifragile, as it’s underpinned by data science and Generative AI. The HBR 5 smart questions, relative to intelligent algorithms and technology — is fragile.
And 6ai is inherently bottom-up too, it prompts and guides users through a disciplined, scientific, 6-step applied intelligence process that retrieves relevant information from reputable and reliable sources and turns it into valuable insight.
At each integral step, users respond to customized prompts that generate more insightful information, refining those insights as users move through. Insights are turned into even higher dimensions of more focused and useful insights, leading to highly relevant and optimal strategy-building insights. Effectively, this is the 6ai applied intelligence (ai) process.
Our focused language models (FLMs): purposeful retrieval augmented generation methods give our FLMs access to highly relevant knowledge bases. Which are more practical and efficient, considerably lessexpensive than training LLMs from scratch, and much easier to manage.
The Prompt Engineering (PE) augmenting process enables our FLMs to access up-to-date and well-sourced insightful information that can be effectively applied to organizational strategy formation, and execution. The retriever and reader methods enable the models to query large corpuses of text, overcoming the issues faced by the limited manual questioning associated with the 5 questions.
6ai contextualizes relevance for further questioning and prompting…deploying a context engine for that function or task…see below.
Again, unlike the more manual and subjectively formulated process the authors have put forward, it would make more sense to try and automate those five questions into a bigger set of more scientific processes, i.e., 6ai.
The following are some of the key functions embedded in the 6ai system:
Economic Value of Information (EVI): How does this data contribute to the bottom line?
Performance Value of Information (PVI): How is this data a key business driver?
Intrinsic Value of Information (IVI): How correct, complete and exclusive is this data?
Business Value of Information (BVI): How good and relevant is this data for the specific purpose?
As you can see there are multiple layers and loops of complexity involved in formulating good strategies, however, 6ai Technologies simplifies it and brings strategy development at the stroke of a keyboard.
Further, we use analytics to prioritize findings, decomposing and assessing the use case findings along core dimensions: value and ease of implementation.
We assess and prioritize the winning conditions and break things down into different mental or physical constructs, that would create different ways to identify the optimal playing field, and the necessary moves for winning. We must know the Why because we can’t figure out a strategy unless we can clearly state what winning looks like. Especially in the context of your organization, sector or industry.
The next thing is implementation, have a realistic assessment and differentiate between the organizational capabilities that allow the organization to “play” vs. those that can allow it to strive and compete at a high level and win.
Success comes by understanding how you will position the product offering against competitors on your playing field; a. offer a lower-cost alternative in a way that you can afford and make a profit with. b. differentiate through a new and better offering? Or c. a combination of both.
In the end, questions must be substantial and lead to more honed-in questions, because the central objective is to find the expected value of the idea’s utility. So by summating all of the functionality or utilities, the idea’s expected utility will be produced to give the expected future performance of the idea. Identifying the winning characteristics or conditions for the idea to succeed is critical because how the future unfolds is independent of the idea.
Therefore, the framing of the strategic question is critical to getting the best rational and highly relevant outputs for decisioning. And those inputs can fuel the highest degree of utility across the most probable future world. This is called finding the Maximum Utility of an idea, a major function that computes the probability of the idea occurring in each possible world scenario.
Technology For Human Progress
6ai software’s core value proposition is accessibility and ease for EVERYONE: from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), organizations, institutions, government, and individuals. We’ve taken a consumer-centric approach and decided to build intelligent software that can empower anyone to develop strategies themselves, without the need for specialized training or technical tools.
Anyone can master strategy development! From billion-dollar corporate strategies to personal self-help strategies.
In the 21st century, organizations are struggling to harness data and technology effectively to build transformative value-added strategies. So we must use 21st-century solutions to problem solve. Consultants come with exorbitant costs, making them inaccessible to the vast majority of the marketplace. And humans can’t compete with the awesome computational processing power of GenAI. However, we can surely use GenAI effectively, purposefully, and responsibly, as an underlying tool to enhance our work and grow our value in the global marketplace.
In a survey of 10, 000 senior leaders: 97% said strategy is the most important thing to their organization’s success. But 96% said they lack the time and the right tools to effectively engage in strategy development — Harvard Business Review.
When asked about the most important business objectives they have set for their enterprise over the next two years, business owners responded: substantial degree of alignment with a growth-oriented business strategy — MIT Technology Review Insights.
6ai is a higher dimensional level of the effective application of useful knowledge — coupled with robustness and reliability. The strategy canvas then enables those without technical backgrounds the ability to develop highly effective strategies, without having to learn complex software or digital tools.
6ai is a simple and practical technology tool for turning data into insight and insight into strategy.
A simple SaaS solution for the easy customer experience, with a warrantable step-by-step process to master internalized strategy development; highly accessible and fraction of the cost of hiring ridiculously priced consultants or advisors.
About 6ai Technologies: 6aitech.com
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