Five Questions Every CEO Should Ask Before Trusting a Number

CEOs are told to be data-driven, but nobody tells them how to know whether the data deserves to drive. After years of building executive dashboards, I have watched leaders either trust every number blindly or distrust all of them equally. Both are expensive.

Here are the five questions I recommend before any important number is used in a decision.

Not philosophically. Literally: which system, which table, which export. If the person presenting cannot trace it to a source, the number is a guess wearing a suit.

A dashboard is a photograph, not a window. Some update hourly, some monthly, and some were last refreshed by an intern who has since left. Every dashboard should show its own refresh time. If yours do not, ask why.

Every metric excludes something: test accounts, refunds, one problematic branch, data before the migration. Exclusions are usually sensible, but they must be known. The most dangerous exclusions are the ones nobody remembers making.

If Finance, Sales, and Operations would each produce a different value for the same question, you do not have a metric. You have three opinions with the same name. Shared definitions, written down and encoded in the data model, are the fix.

If no decision changes when the number moves, it is decoration, and decoration crowds out the numbers that matter. The best dashboards I have built are small. Every tile earns its place by changing what someone does next.

Ask these five questions about the numbers you saw this week. The answers, and the speed at which they arrive, will tell you more about your data maturity than any audit.