Develop fact bases that drive better decisions.

In the perpetual meet-discuss-decide cycle of the workplace is building a fact base a lost art?  Leave your comments below.

A fact base is a simple document that lays out the most important findings of research on a topic.  I do them for competitive assessments, strategy decisions, business growth assessments and more.  Fact bases create common understanding, dispel myths and false perceptions, and set the foundation for well-informed discussions & decisions.  Here are 5 best practices for creating a powerful fact base. 

1. Suspend Judgement.  Keep your mind open during the research. Don’t start developing conclusions or inferences until after you are done. This will help you to explore further and wider and identify more themes and trends vs getting locked in on a specific issue or insight.

2. Stick to the facts.  A fact base is not a place for judgement, conjecture, or hypothesis.  If you are doing market analysis, focus on the data, like market entry and growth rates, not what you think about the company.  Don’t say you heard a product was bad, find out if there are publicly disclosed recalls or other data that can be validated and document that.   

3. Be systematic.  For example, if I am profiling a company, I’ll sequentially research: Company history and strategy, Key Execs, Products, and Customers.  I’ll then strengthen the fact base with one-to-one interviews with several individuals that have direct experience of that company.  

4. Engage others meaningfully with the fact base.  Getting stakeholders immersed in the content is key to developing consensus and action.  For smaller investigations (5-10 hrs.) I find it most effective to have a team review and extend sections of the fact base as pre-work for a session vs having them do sections themselves from scratch.  Bigger investigations need coordinated research by teams.

5.  Good enough is good enough.  Time bound your analysis.  Fact bases are a point in time exercise, usually at the onset of a project.  The value of the fact base lies in the hypotheses, decisions and actions that result, not in the document itself.