Hercule Poirot and solving business problems

I am a big fan of detective mysteries, especially Agatha Christie’s novels. Reading them, I noticed that her detective, Hercule Poirot, is often presented as one of the smartest people in Europe. Yet at the start of an investigation, when he lacks all the facts, he has no chance of guessing the culprit. But by the end, once the clues are gathered, the mystery becomes so clear that many readers, even less bright than Poirot, can guess the solution.

The same principle applies to business problems. Without all the facts, you will struggle to find the right solution. Even the smartest person can only work with the information they have, and applying the right reasoning to partial information may still lead to the wrong answer.

Conversely, if you gain a solid understanding of the context, behaviors, and perspectives of those involved in the problem you are trying to solve, the solution will become apparent, even if you are not that smart.

Hence, the importance of digging deep and collecting quality information.

But what exactly counts as quality information, and how can it be collected?

What is Quality Information?

• Aggregate data is not quality information. Financial statements, data reports, and surveys have their utility and can surface problems, but even then, they leave you guessing at the root cause. They remain an important piece, but you cannot rely on them alone.

• Anecdotes are quality information. They contain enough context to identify the root cause without guessing: either it is evident from the anecdote itself, or it points you to the right person to clarify what happened. Of course, an anecdote might be an outlier, a one-off due to exceptional circumstances. However, it is far easier and more reliable to verify whether an anecdote is representative than to guess the root cause from aggregate data.

• Incident investigations are quality information. If done well (and I will cover how), they are essentially anecdotes: a bundle of in-depth information that tells us not only what happened but also why.

• Direct observations are quality information. Walking the manufacturing floor and talking to line workers, visiting a retail shop where your product is sold and chatting with clerks and customers, or visiting one of your offices and speaking with back-office employees are excellent ways to collect anecdotes about problems and opportunities seen by people with unique perspectives.

How to Collect Quality Information

In theory, you could collect these anecdotes using methods that scale, such as surveys or online forms. In practice, those methods rarely gather more than one or two paragraphs, far from enough to grasp the full context and motivations of those involved.

Quality information can only be collected through methods that do not scale: in-person conversations or video calls, where the interviewer can ask follow-up questions and dig deep to capture the full context.

If you are a busy executive, you might lack the time to collect high-quality information and wish to delegate it. That is fine, provided you follow these guidelines:

• Allow only methods that do not scale. No surveys or data reports, only in-person or video interviews. At least 75% should be one-on-one: group interviews have benefits, but social pressures limit honesty and prevent hard questions.

• Do not let your delegee delegate the interviews further. The more people a piece of information passes through, the more a “broken telephone” effect corrupts it.

• No summaries, only full anecdotes. Your delegee may filter for importance or cut irrelevant parts, but never summarize. The value is in the details.

• Tell your delegee to dig deep, relentlessly asking “why.” Why did this happen? Why did they do this instead of that? What is their guess about someone else’s actions?

• Instruct them to collect pieces of the puzzle, not solve it. Guessing solutions too early risks misleading or halting the investigation. First, gather information, then solve the puzzle.

• Preserve names whenever possible. Privacy matters, so get permission to use names whenever possible. This will be invaluable for follow-ups. Moreover, anecdotes with a name and a face are easier to remember and more likely to drive change.

Two takeaways

1. Do not jump into problem-solving mode before having collected enough pieces of the puzzle.
2. It's often a better use of your time to dig truly deep into a single anecdote than to collect more superficial data. Only the former will help you truly understand what's going on and why.