Why Can’t Your Leadership Team Agree on What’s Driving Growth?

Why can’t your leadership team agree on what’s driving growth?

Your leadership team can’t agree on what drives growth because each leader looks at different data and treats it as the whole business. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman called this “what you see is all there is,” or WYSIATI. Every leader is confident and partly right, but no one has a full picture of how what your company does shapes what your customers do, and how what your customers do shapes revenue.

If you’re not familiar with him, Kahneman was a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how people actually make decisions, rather than how the ‘rational’ economic model assumes they do. I strongly recommend his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. But you should know, his book reads like it was written by a Nobel Prize winner in economics! Great information, tough read.

WYSIATI tells us that when we decide quickly, we build the most coherent story we can from what’s in front of us, and we rarely stop to ask what’s missing. Operations looks at the operational data and sees those challenges as the key problems undercutting growth. Sales focuses on “the voice of the last lost customer,” arguing that this is what is hurting growth. The product team sees its new products as the source of future growth. Each function looks at its own data and takes it for the whole business. Every leader is confident and partly right, so no one has a shared picture of how what you do in your business shapes what customers do, and how that shapes revenue.

It’s like the story of six blind men feeling an elephant in different places. Each is feeling something very different—the trunk versus the leg versus the ear—and confidently reporting a different type of beast. Each of them is right about the part he’s holding and wrong about the animal.

How I learned this the hard way

I worked in customer research at a giant health insurer, in their Health Savings Account Division. Our organization led the nation in sales. Unfortunately, it also led the nation in account cancellations.

On top of that, 14% of customers never opened their accounts, which meant millions of dollars in missed deposits every year.

In other words, I had the world’s two easiest business cases at my disposal. Which one did I use? Neither.

Instead, I led with my survey outcomes and interview research, sharing that our customers were frustrated, because that was the data in front of me.

The product team strongly disagreed. One told me, “Jim, we don’t need to talk to customers. We are customers, and I’m not frustrated.” That was the data that he saw.

At the same time, our executives saw record growth and didn’t look deeper to see the churn.

So, different audiences reviewed their own data. I looked at my frustration data and they didn’t see the dollars in that, so I lost the argument. Instead, I was told, “You create a lot of noise.” One day, I came in to find I had a new job: writing marketing collateral to reduce the noise I created.

Business growth hides a multitude of sins. I had the churn and deposit numbers all along. If I’d connected my survey data to them and taken it to finance, I’d have spoken the executives’ language instead of mine, and I’d have been far more successful.

Why it gets worse as you grow
Every modern business has specialists. Each function is measured, paid, and fed data about its own capabilities.

Another example from that time. Each silo created part of the customer experience separately, based on what they saw. Marketing wrote detailed tax-savings communications, because that’s what product told them was important. Unfortunately, few of our customers actually read that content.

Product added pricing tiers to “differentiate,” based on their experience with the product. At the same time, Sales heard from customers that the pricing tiers were too complicated, so they removed them whenever possible.

Each was making the best decision they could with the information they had. As a result, costs went up, and outcomes didn’t improve.

I see the same problem in my current research. When writing Do B2B Better, I conducted over 200 hours of interviews with customer experience and marketing leaders. Most focused on customer feedback data exclusively.

In last year’s 34 C-suite interviews, executives never looked at that feedback data; instead, they focused on behavioral data showing what customers do.

What this looks like from the CMO’s chair
In a September 2025 Harvard Business Review article titled “When CMOs and CFOs Align their KPIs, They Deliver More Value,” Michael Kaminsky argued that CMOs have some of the shortest tenures in the C-suite because marketing’s measures don’t connect to what finance values. That’s WYSIATI between two offices: marketing sees reach and leads, and finance sees forecastable dollars. When marketing and finance disagree, finance wins every time.

To build a stronger scorecard, don’t focus on leads or where you’re spending money. Instead, show what customers are doing as a result of your experience. That’s the advice behind Tincher Truth #63: “The CFO doesn’t need your story. The CFO needs your math.”

I spoke about this in Episode 2 of my podcast From Stalled to Scaling, ‘The Sentence That Wins the Budget’

What to do first: build the shared picture.
To align your executive team, pick one behavior it already tracks. That could be churn, growing customers, or anything else. Next, trace it back to the customer signals and operating data that explain it.

Here’s an example. We worked with an insurance company that sold through independent agents. In one segment, more than half of first-time agents never sold the company’s products again, and nobody knew why. The surveys showed scattered complaints about the sales process, but nothing connected. We found the answer when we connected the surveys to the operational data. The agents who complained had been stuck in an unusually long licensing process while trying to make their first sale. That’s the chain: a slow licensing process frustrated new agents, so they stopped selling the company’s products, and the company lost revenue from every agent who didn’t come back. The survey found the symptom. Connected data identified the cause, and fixing licensing reduced agent churn.

Solving this problem requires you to build the data chain and overcome WYSIATI. Once you have the chain, bring it to your CFO first so that finance can validate it. It’s also good practice to let them deliver it, since they have the credibility.

You can’t fix what your peers can’t see, so show it to them in their numbers.

FAQ

1. What does “what you see is all there is” mean in business? ‘What you see is all there is’ is Daniel Kahneman’s term for how people reach confident conclusions from the information in front of them without accounting for what’s missing. In business, it shows up as departments reading their own data as the whole story. Effective, customer-focused change requires understanding what each department sees, then complementing it with connected data to show the overall picture and align leadership around a fuller view.
2. Why do sales, marketing, and operations disagree about what’s driving growth? WYSIATI tells us that each team makes fast decisions (one of the two decision-making approaches Kahneman discusses, and the most common) based on the data in front of them, and rarely stops to ask what’s missing. Because every team focuses on different data, each one develops its own story, which drives separate decisions.
3. What should a CMO measure besides marketing metrics? You likely have customer feedback data. Start by connecting it to behavioral data to show how it influences customers’ decisions to buy more or less, or to try new products. Next, it’s fairly easy to connect financial data to behavior; once you know they bought more, add how much more they bought to complete the story. Lastly, the business will want to know what it needs to change in its operations. (Here, I’m using lower-case “o” operations, because this also involves your policy, communications, and sales approaches.) So, connect that operational data to your customer feedback. This creates the Growth Chain™: Operational Levers -> Emotions -> Behaviors -> Financial Outcomes.
4. How do you get operations to act on what customers are telling you? This can only happen when you connect their data to yours. Operations is rewarded based on their data. If you need them to change their decisions, you have to show that hitting their KPIs hurts the business (if, in fact, they do). Only then can you work with them to change those KPIs to create better customer outcomes.
5. How do you connect what customers are telling you to revenue? You need to add an intermediate step: their actions, typically in order data. One client skipped this step, showing how NPS led to higher revenue. That seemed like a win. Unfortunately, this connection didn’t tell the business what to do differently, so it didn’t create impact. Instead, show how the feedback is changing the revenue picture – is it driving customers to leave you, to increase their ordering velocity, or try new or fewer products? That additional behavioral data creates a far more compelling picture.