critical thinking

(bowing low to The Economist)

You've read Lee Siegel, the New York-based critic who writes for Harpers, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Republic (again). He writes erudite, prickly prose on the subject of American culture – or what counts for it. At one point the New York Times referred to him as "one of the most eloquent and acid-tongued critics in the country." In a nation that enjoys a bit of battering of our neighbor -- and which lives by the adage if you're so smart why ain't you rich? -- even the most liberal-minded of us get both an intellectual thrill and an ignoble shiver reading his work.

Though I highly recommend him for his wit and range, his personal story is a cautionary tale. In 2006 he was suspended from his role at The New Republic for, well, what? Misleading comments, I believe it was. Siegel didn't break any rules, nor certainly any laws. But he had established an alter-ego that attacked negative commentators on his blog. This alter-ego, known as sprezzatura, was an ardent defender of Siegel, Siegel's wit, and Siegel's shining intelligence. OK, so what, right? He's a little insecure.

The situation was disturbing, but not for the reasons most people pointed to. Most commonly, people expressed their disgust at how stupid it was, how egotistical it was, and ultimately, at what a baby Siegel was. The last comment approaches the reason it was appropriate that Siegel was temporarily suspended.

So what if the critic can't take criticism -- that's a weakness that hounds far too many people to make it interesting. The problem was that he was hypocritical at a level that was a betrayal of his true audience. The role of critic suggests intellectual rigor and standards. Critical thinking is the careful analysis of whatever it is we are evaluating, getting past emotions, reactions, historical baggage, psychology, bias, enculturation -- all of the muck that clouds our thinking and prevents us from seeing reality in the clearest possible light. Not that most modern critics actually perform that role for us, but we wish they would. We need them to. And Siegel is capable of operating at the highest levels of intellectual criticism.

Why do I care about something that that is, by American standards, ancient history? Because of something a friend of mine said tonight. My friend Mark and I were talking about billboards in the UK, and how much we appreciate them. In the United States, billboard writers obviously go through a process that, if you were a fly on the wall, would sound something like this:

Ad guy 1: Dude, we need another billboard for our very difficult client.

Ad guy 2: Damn. Didn't we just finish a bunch of billboards for them?

Ad guy 1: Yeah. I hate doing billboards.

Important advertising note. Billboards must be able to deliver a message in less than 3 seconds at roughly 55 mph. Ad guys hate to be responsible for traffic deaths. Well, we assume so anyway.

Ad guy 1: OK, what's the simplest way we can say "get your new muffler at Dan's Auto Haus?"

Ad guy 2: Can't just we say that?

Ad guy 1: No. People don't read that fast. We still have to have room for their website and maybe a phone number.

Ad guy 2: OK, how about, "Mufflers. Dans. www.dansautohaus.com."

Ad guy 1: They might think we're advertising, like, mittens or something.

Ad guy 2: It's summer.

Ad guy 1: Whatever. I don't think it will work.

Ad guy 2: OK, what about, "Noisy car? Dan's Mufflers."

Ad guy 1: They'll think it's just a muffler shop. Dan won't like that.

You get the picture. Eventually the ad guys consult a reference book for children's writing and choose three words from the kindergarten list, and that's what passes for advertising in this country.

In the UK, billboards are vexing. Not only are you trying not to wipe out the left side of your car every time you turn the corner and jumping when people pop out at you from the wrong side of the street, but your head is swimming with the last three billboards you read that you still haven't made sense of. UK billboards cater to the thinkers in their society, which they obviously assume are many, given how democratic they are with their puzzling advertising.

Are American advertising firms dumbing everything down because Americans are lazy thinkers, or are Americans lazy thinkers because we are confronted -- no, assaulted -- by a constant barrage of stupidity? Please, don't try to answer that – it's a chicken-and-egg thing.

It's important to read Lee Siegel because he's capable of – and for the most part, delivers – criticism filled with intellectual honesty. I'm pretty sure I never want him to take on one of my publications, because as thick-skinned as I am, I've probably not evolved to the point where I'm ready to read his take on my work without a therapist by my side. Still, he challenges his readers to intellectual debate. This is an experience to which we have become unaccustomed. Siegel doesn't cater to lazy thinkers. Indeed, he writes as if he expects us to be intelligent.

Lee Siegel should be completely forgiven for his past lapse (and yes, I realize that I am the one bringing it up again, but I couldn't figure out another way to make my point). Seriously. If we're being honest, we can all think of foolish things we have done that disgraced us but didn't add any further damage to the human condition.

But Siegel does have a responsibility that is very similar to that of any parent. We know that parents must set a good example for their children. Parental example is something children count on to feel confident. Parental example is the ballast each child needs while bobbing about in the wakes of peer pressure, demoralizing teachers, and Ad guys 1 and 2.

Those of us who seek a more intellectual discourse are dependent on cultural leaders - of all types – to maintain a certain quality of critical thought. This is a completely reciprocal responsibility (did you think you were off the hook?). The only way to create a rigorous intellectualism for ourselves is to give it first to others, and by doing so we are able to receive the thing we want. That's right – intellectualism is not a zero sum game. The only way we can have it is to give it away. That requires dialogue. Which requires risk. Which was Siegel's failure. Shared by the rest of us, though most of us don't have to fail in such a public forum.

Perhaps Ad guys 1 and 2 are not really ready for this. But I suggest we give them the benefit of the doubt. If enough of us gave intellectual discourse away – trusting everyone around us not to be lazy thinkers – perhaps we would discover ourselves, once again, a country that thinks. I'd wager it would do a lot more for our economy than another cut in the Fed Funds Rate or a bunch of $300 rebates.

There are few things I have been more disastrously bad at than dating. I was the poster child for dating the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and then continuing to date them for more of the wrong reasons. Not only was I bad at it … I was bad at it for more than a decade. It was so bad that I caused my friends considerable discomfort. So bad that there was finally an intervention.

The intervention went something like this:

BFF 1: “What are you even doing? What is it you’re looking for when you go on a date?

Me: “What do you mean what am I looking for? I’m looking for a date. How is this even a question?”

BFF 2: “No you’re not. We know you. You want to have kids. You want a family. You’re the nesty-est nester of all of us. You’re not looking for a date. You’re looking for a relationship.

Me: “Well that’s why I go on dates! How am I supposed to be finding a relationship if I don’t go on dates?”

BFF 1: “Yes, but you’re doing the dates all wrong.”

Me: “Well I’m not going home with them on the first date if that’s what you mean.”

BFF 1: “That’s not what we mean. You’re not asking the right questions. You’re not even putting them in the right setting.”

Raised by Wolves

There is an ongoing joke between my siblings and me that we were essentially raised by wolves. Case in point: How had nobody ever bothered to explain to me that there was a point to dating, and that the point was relative to what it was you were trying to accomplish? My friends went on to illustrate how each of our dating approaches were different because we each wanted something different. Who knew there was a science to dating?  (apparently, everyone but me)

The intervention landed me in dating rehab for a few months while I stopped to evaluate how I should approach dating to achieve my desired life goals. And it wasn’t long before I started applying this new lesson to everything I did.

As it turns out, most job interviewers were also raised by wolves; trained to do job interviews by people who had no training themselves in job interviews. Or, worse yet, never trained by anyone at all. And the result is a lot of disastrous dates hires, many of which go on to be relationships that are disappointing, psychologically and monetarily expensive, and hard to get out of.

There Is a Science to Interviewing

Interviewing is used in a lot of roles: Journalists conduct news interviews, scientists conduct research interviews, criminologists conduct case interviews, law enforcement officers conduct interviews of people adjacent to crimes, health care professionals conduct patient interviews … and all these professionals are trained in something called interview science. Yet when it comes to job interviews, most managers just start firing questions at candidates about whatever pops into their heads.

It's no surprise that so many hires are just another bad first date followed by a U-Haul rental.

One of my companies is a strategic HR advisory consulting firm, and it has become somewhat of a mission for me to help our clients do a better job of dating hiring, and that means doing a better job in the interview process.

The Science of Interviewing

You could spend (as I have) months of coursework and years of practice to learn the science of interviewing, but some basic knowledge goes a long way.

Interviewing is an interdisciplinary field, which means that it draws upon principles from psychology, communication studies, sociology, and data analytics to create a process that is intentional, structured, capable of delivering a specific result, and fair. Science is required  because interviewing is about understanding human motivation and how that motivation influences behavior. While we cannot perfectly predict future performance for anyone based on an understanding of their past actions, a well-structured and conducted interview can get us closer to understanding than a random collection of questions without any strategy behind them can.

And if you think you can depend on your gut for this, you’re destined for many bad marriages hires. I won’t even try to explain in this already longish blog why that’s a bad idea, but you could read this book if you want to know more. In it, Malcolm Gladwell does a fantastic job of laying out the risks of trusting one’s gut too much when it comes to assessing people.

The principle we lean on most in interview science is Behavioral Psychology. Behavioral psychology is the branch of psychology that focuses on how past behavior influences future actions. Social Psychology also plays a strong role, helping us understand group dynamics, communication patterns and — of grave importance — understanding how biases influence interview outcomes. The Communications discipline, including active listening and attending to non-verbal cues, is crucial to creating a productive interview environment.

Like most scientific disciplines, there are many theories about the best ways to use all these principles to do interviews. Some theories are more suited to some professions than others. For example, the Reid Technique is a police interrogation theory that would not be at all suitable for job interviews. Likewise, Cognitive Interviewtheory as used in forensic psychology would be deeply intrusive and inappropriate for a job interview. But there are several interview theories and practices that are applicable to the hiring process.

One of them is Competency Based Interviewing Theory, which focuses on assessing the specific skills and competencies relevant to a job. Most people who have never studied interview science would say, “Yes! That’s the theory I’m using!” But there’s way more to it than simply asking about skills and experiences. Competency Based Interviewing Theory uses structured behavioral questions to elicit detailed examples of past experiences. It provides a framework for getting past superficial knowledge and into deeper understanding of a candidate’s abilities and suitability for a given job. Competency Based Interviewing also provides the necessary framework for ensuring a fair and objective assessment across all the candidates for a given job.

Another theory used in a good hiring process is Cognitive Ability Theory, which assesses a person’s problem-solving abilities. Again, if you’ve ever asked “how would you solve such-and-such problem,” this does not mean you were using Cognitive Ability Theory. Unlike simply asking about past problem-solving experiences, this theory involves tailored assessments that delve into a candidate's innate abilities, providing a more direct evaluation of their cognitive aptitude and analytical reasoning skills. To do this, you need suitable assessment tools to provide the data necessary to analyze each candidate and formulate the right questions.

We also use Situational Judgment Theory in the hiring process, which involves presenting candidates with hypothetical scenarios to evaluate their responses and test their judgment and decision-making skills. Again, this isn’t as simple as asking “how might you …” questions. Using Situational Judgment theory, the professional interviewer studies the role thoroughly, identifies the critical competencies and scenarios relevant to the position, and then creates a set of situational questions designed to specifically assess these competencies. The questions are designed right down to the way the questions are asked, because if the questions themselves are vague, or are asked differently from candidate to candidate, the results will not be fair or reliable.

A well-structured interview process involves all these practices and sometimes a few more, depending on the professional requirements of the role. All candidates should be asked the same set of questions to ensure fairness, though the questions asked during the probing of cognitive ability are likely to be different from candidate to candidate based on their differing attributes, qualifications, skills and experiences. The key is to strike a balance between consistency and customization to gain insight into each candidate’s qualifications and potential.

Since all humans have biases, it is also essential to provide bias awareness training, to include diverse interview panels, and to make use of good data for the assessment, interviewing and decision-making process. Efforts to mitigate the effects of bias will produce more equitable — and higher quality! — hiring outcomes (see new section on the use of AI in hiring, added on 10/30/2023 as an addendum at the end of this article)

If you are getting the impression that you must interview someone 32 times to understand if they are the right candidate, that would be wrong. In fact, the majority of good hiring decisions can be made with just two interviews … as long as those two interviews are well-structured.

What Skills and Experience Won’t Tell You

Of course, a candidate can have all the skills and experience in the world, and still be a douchecanoe that gives you a chronic headache and makes all your other employees want to quit. Most skills can be trained on the job, but you cannot train someone to have character, to be kind, to care about others’ needs and opinions, or to be disciplined. These are all attributes that each interviewee has already been born with, raised to, or chosen, and nothing you do in onboarding or training will change those fundamental characteristics.

There are simply some personality and behavioral traits that make candidates a better employee, and you must uncover those in the interview as well. You can use a combination of Behavioral and Situational Judgment interviewing techniques to uncover these issues. But again, I  caution: Simply asking the question “You discover a colleague engaging in unethical behavior. What steps would you take, and how would you balance your loyalty to your colleague with your commitment to the company’s ethical standards?” will not give you the insight you need, because everyone knows how to answer that question “correctly.” You must also employ Depth Interviewing skills to ask the right follow-up questions in the right way to encourage candidates to provide more detailed, specific,and … eventually … genuine responses.

The Interview Sequence

I prefer a two-interview strategy for most hires. I say for most, because for leadership positions and other roles with great strategic impact, two interviews are rarely sufficient. But the majority of hiring activity is for the rest of the roles, and two interviews can work very well if you structure them properly.

In my experience interviews are best done with more than one interviewer, which helps balance out preconceptions and biases and allows you to take advantage of differences in perception and interpretation. But if there will be multiple interviewers, it is important to have the whole group follow the same script and to train the group on how to interview together.

The first interview is to get at the questions of character, personal discipline, and orientation to others. This can be a short interview (20-30 minutes). In the first interview, I only probe skills and experiences as a mechanism for exploring character, discipline, and behavioral or communication issues. No matter how smart or experienced a candidate is, if I see warning bells on issues of character and behavior, there’s no second interview. Why bother? A less skilled candidate with better behavioral attributes will serve the company better in the long term, so there’s no risk when it comes to passing on people that come with a behavioral warning label.

Besides, most of what you need to know in the first interview should have been visible from the resume and/or your job application. Where they worked, what they did, skills required to do the job … these are all things you should review before the first interview is even scheduled. If you don’t receive sufficient insight on the resume, send them your job application (which should ask for sufficient insight) before scheduling the first interview.

For those candidates we deem interesting enough to do a second interview, we schedule them for a pre-employment assessment first. We administer the 16 Personality Factors Comprehensive Insights assessment by Talogy, because it gives us the greatest insight for developing further interview questions, and it benefits from greater peer review and anti-bias development than any other assessment we’ve researched (which is not to say there’s any such thing as a personality or performance assessment that is completely without bias, but that’s another article).

The second interview typically lasts an hour and includes a selection of questions designed to deliver insight into all the candidates’ skills, experience, abilities, behaviors, and motivations, plus individual questions derived from our analysis of the pre-employment assessment.

It is important to group the first and second interviews together as much as possible. This helps to remember candidates more clearly relative to one another and can also help to reduce personal biases and filters from interfering with good hiring decisions. In most cases we have enough insight to choose from among the candidates after second interviews are complete.

Conclusion

The science of interviewing integrates psychology, communications, social sciences, and ethical considerations to deliver a systematic approach for evaluating candidates. Does that sound like a lot of work? Well, it’s not so much a lot of work as it is a lot of learning and study. These days I can prepare for a good interview process in an hour or two, but it’s taken me 30 years of study and practice to get to this point. Is it worth it? Most definitely. Understanding human behavior and using best practices improves the accuracy and the fairness of hiring, which leads to making better choices and, ultimately, to running better companies.

Which brings us back to dating. After what I lovingly refer to as the “Big BFF Intervention, or BBI” my dating took a turn for the better, and it wasn’t long after that I found the relationship that would turn into the love of my life and (at the time I write this) nearly 25 years of commitment. Though I do appreciate the mistakes I made before the BBI, I’m also quite relieved that I was able to stop making them. After all, dating is fun … for a while. But what you really want to do is get on with your life, and when it comes to the quality of life … and business! … the decisions we make really matter.

Addendum: AI in the Interview Process

The following addendum added on 10/30/2023 to reflect accelerating use of AI in the hiring process.

The fact that HR departments — and companies that have no formal HR process at all — are increasingly integrating AI tools into the hiring process is concerning on many levels. It is hard enough to get human beings past their biases, poor listening skills, and vague communications; though producing structured interviews and providing training can at least help with that. But the algorithms powering AI tools are opaque, and we have no idea if they have been meticulously designed to avoid biases.

AI systems learn from historical data, and if that data contains biases, AI will perpetuate those biases and cause discriminatory outcomes. To date there is very little transparency regarding the data used for AI decision-making. You need to understand and be able to explain how AI systems make recommendations (download our e-book to understand the evaluation process you should use when implementing AI in any business process).

Of equal concern, the lack of human empathy and understanding in AI systems could lead to misinterpretation of candidate responses. Human emotions and contextual cues are vital for successful interviewing, and AI cannot respond to them the way a trained human interviewer would. If an initial video interview is conducted using AI, only to be skimmed watched by a hiring manager after-the-fact, there’s no opportunity to further probe candidate responses. This can lead to failure to understand a candidate’s suitability for a role. Additionally, reliance on AI hiring tools might result in a loss of the personal touch needed to effectively evaluate a candidate’s soft skills, emotional intelligence, and cultural fit within an organization.

AI is being used to increase hiring efficiency, but it should be used sparingly. Concerns about fairness, unbiased evaluation, and privacy protection are important, but perhaps most important is that AI still does not have the ability to use psychology, sociology, and communication sciences sufficiently to improve HR outcomes. The result for most companies will likely be making all the same hiring mistakes they make now … only faster.

Who hasn’t experienced that moment of dread when we first realize a serious mistake has been made? The initial feeling is great insecurity: How did this happen? What will my boss think of me? How will my peers view me? Will this cause us to lose clients? Market share? Brand value? Could I get demoted? Lose my job? 

What happens next is driven by personality, character, and (hopefully) company culture. Do you immediately raise the alarm, own it, and figure out how to address it? Or do you take the opposite approach and bury or try to obfuscate? If the mistake is being reported to you, do you get angry and place blame? Pile on criticism even as someone tries to be accountable? Or do you go into problem-solving mode with them?

It’s in the what-happens-next that great businesses (and leaders) distinguish themselves from the average and the insufficient. Mistakes provide the ultimate training ground for one of life’s  greatest teachers … process.

The Difference Between Knowing and Understanding

I used to think that having an eidetic memory would be an incredible advantage — that the ability to remember everything I ever read, learned, or experienced would help me to excel. Then I encountered someone who had an eidetic memory, and she helped me change my mind.

First, she pointed out that the downside of remembering everything one ever experienced is at least as great as the upside. Fair. Second, she distinguished between knowing something and being good at something. And she was right. Before I mastered bread-baking I memorized the ingredients and instructions, but I had to experience the process multiple times before I could make a loaf worth eating. Before I had the opportunity to lead large numbers of people I studied leadership, motivation, and management. But I had to apply all that knowledge to real life and make real mistakes to develop leadership skill. 

The person with the eidetic memory was clear about the limitations of her gift. She was able to recall volumes of content with remarkable precision, but the knowledge ended there, because she lacked the experience to apply and connect much of it. In her words, she was “like a librarian, only faster, because I don’t need to consult the card catalog.”

Process Matters More than Results

It is through this lens that we can best understand that the purpose of business is not end results, but process. 

I can feel the feathers ruffling from here as everyone who has ever created a quarterly shareholder report, attended a management meeting or been the evalu-ee in an annual employee review shakes their heads, clenches their fists, and gasps aloud at how any serious business practitioner could fail to grasp the all-consuming requirement of RESULTS. 

I would like you to pat down those feathers, take a cool sip of water and consider how fixation on results over process ultimately leads to lack of innovation, the failure of employees to thrive, loss of competitiveness and even erosion of ethics.

Four Ways that Process Drives Excellence

Perhaps 90% of what happens in a business is repetitive process. From accounting to customer support to product development to marketing, each functional area of any business involves countless processes done by a sometimes stable, sometimes changing group of people. Admonishments to deliver “great customer service” will rarely yield the results you desire, but focus on improving the processes by which you deliver customer service can lead to greatness.

Process Documentation Improves Performance

One of my great frustrations as a business owner is how I often end up doing things myself because it’s faster than handing off the task. But peek behind the curtain of that frustration, and the problem is me. Many of the tasks I do are largely intuitive, based on decades of experience and muscle memory. But this doesn’t make the way I am doing them the most efficient nor even the most effective. 

When you stop and think through a process sufficiently to write it down so someone else can do it, you invariably improve the process. You will find gaps in the process that could lead to error. You will uncover assumptions that are no longer (or perhaps never were) relevant. You can visualize where you are taking three steps when one would be sufficient. When process documentation is done as a group, you discover how many different ways people are doing a process. As the group streamlines the process and learns from each other, the resulting process conformity decreases errors.  The act of documenting a process leads to greater efficiency and quality.

Process Uniformity Ensures that Improvements Reach Everyone in the Organization

When the organization achieves process uniformity, the first and obvious benefits are that errors go down, quality goes up, and efficiency improves. Those would be reason enough to embrace the value of processes. But there is still more benefit to be had.

The way you maintain process uniformity is to insist that process change is always an option, but that process change itselfis a process. In every organization there are always a few people that perform head-and-shoulders above the others. Some of this will be due to innate talent and drive. But some of it will be that those people are improving the way they do their processes - improvements the rest of the company does not know about.

If your process change practice requires that anyone who has an idea for improving a process must bring that improvement to the group for discussion, testing, and agreement, then two things will happen: 1) genuine improvements will make it to the rest of the organization, and 2) ideas that are not actually improvements will not make it into the live environment.

Process Review Tied to Goals Leads to Success

When working with companies to set metrics for profit growth and quality improvement, one of the performance drivers is always related to process improvement. How does this look?  Here are a few examples:

Goal Example 1: Increase Overall Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

• Metrics of success (RESULTS!) will generally be quantitative, like respond to emails 10% faster or reduce returns related to shipping errors by 15%. 
• Most teams, without proper guidance, will simply try to work harder and/or faster to achieve those goals.
• But the way to achieve quantitative goals is to engage in qualitative behavior, like understanding all the underlying causes of shipping errors or understanding the methods of distributing and responding to customer emails. In other words, process analysis and improvement.

Goal Example 2: Improve Return on Product Development Investment

• Metrics of success could include $XXXX sales or 16% sales growth from new products or 11% new customer acquisition through new products.
• The best way to achieve those results is through analyzing your new product decision-making processes, product development process, and communication processes and dynamics between product development, sales, and marketing.

If you start with the assumption that any process can be improved, and you proactively review the processes underlying every business goal, your ability to deliver the desired results will improve. After all, result metrics are simply the what. Process improvement is the how. 

Process Can Transform Problems Into Opportunities

But what about all the things that happen in a business that aren’t repetitive processes … the mistakes and the anomalies?

As I mentioned earlier, once the mistake has been discovered, what happens next could easily come down to differences in character and responsibility. But your business can’t afford that. You need problems to be effectively addressed as quickly as they are discovered. 

The first step is to have a process for addressing mistakes. 

Simply having a process for solving problems is an important nod to the reality that mistakes will happen. Companies that acknowledge that mistakes will happen and create methods for addressing them eliminate some of the defensive behavior that can make problems worse. More importantly, you can create a culture that responds with creativity rather than punitorily to mistakes, and this is where the magic happens.

Most mistakes are honest mistakes. In an environment where process is respected and processes are well-documented and trained, mistakes are generally the result of changing conditions in the market, new technologies, new business expectations, or evolution of the business model. It is impossible to anticipate all the ways that internal and external change might lead to mistakes (though it’s important to try). For those things we don’t anticipate, mistakes become our professor.

When a team engages in the problem-solving process, they go from knowing something to understanding something. Without the problem-solving process, they may only know the most superficial aspect of the problem, such as “Mark screwed up,” or they may even know that “Mark didn’t realize that Erin recorded the changes in inventory values incorrectly, and as a result we owe a lot of back taxes.”

Moving beyond knowing to understanding requires figuring out why Mark didn’t realize that Erin recorded the changes in inventory values incorrectly. A well-defined problem-solving process will help you define the problem, determine the cause of the problem, explore any other variables that could also lead to the problem, and create a solution that not only addresses the current problem but also prevents it from happening in the future. This will make your company more efficient and resilient. 

It can also lead to consistent, even transformative, innovation.

This aspect of process management is incredibly exciting. Ask a group of people in a room to come up with a new idea, and watch the human embodiment of writer’s block unfold before your eyes. After uncomfortable silence, the ideas will either be based on things other companies are doing already or so far out there that you need a rocket to reach them. 

Outside of silver bullets (which are widely published but rarely occur), most transformative innovation comes as a result of evaluating how something is done so observantly and so often that you are able to identify new opportunities that you couldn’t see or which were not possible before.

Commitment to continuously improving the processes of the business IS a commitment to results, but it brings with it the possibility of evolution and innovation. More importantly, you begin to see the truth of business results: Namely, that a result is simply a lagging indicator, but process is what drives the entire organization forward.