A while back I wrote Dashboards don’t lie, but selection does. The argument there was simple: nobody has to fake a number for a story to mislead. Somebody just chooses what goes in the frame. Fine. But a diagnosis is not a practice, and complaining about framing is easy. This is the other half. What I actually do when a clean story lands in front of me.
The number is the last thing I look at. First, the story. What is this trying to tell me? Every update and readout is built to land somewhere. Give me the claim in one sentence, the sentence I am actually being asked to believe, and now we have something that can be audited.
Then motive. It matters what room the story was built for. An OKR getting relayed is one thing. An achievement being claimed is another. Business health, another again. The pressures are different in each, and so is the framing. Underneath that there is a plainer question: what is tied to this number? Whose performance, whose gain, gets better if the number lands a certain way? I am not accusing anybody of anything. Framing pressure does not need intent. It just needs something riding on the outcome.
Then the notes. If there are any. A chart gives you a message. A summary gives you a message. Neither gives you the story behind the message, and the story is where the gotchas are, the nuances, the caveats, the whole fine print the message was built on. That is what I read the notes for. When the notes confess the limits, I start trusting the story a little. When there are no notes, the story is asking to be believed at full price, and I notice that.
The questions come after all that, and by then they are not generic. They are aimed at this story. Usually five. What led to it, because numbers do not move by themselves; something got spent or shipped or changed, and a story with the input missing is incomplete in a way that is rarely an accident. What are we comparing against, since every result is a comparison in disguise and the baseline is where conclusions get decided without a fight. Where are the counter-metrics, the numbers that paid for this gain, because there is always a metric that absorbed the cost and its absence from the story is itself a fact. How did the competition do, if that exists. And was there a headwind or a tailwind, because markets rise and seasons turn and algorithms change, and until the outside world is priced in, credit and blame are both fiction.
If this sounds abstract, it should not. The most expensive framing failure of the last decade collapsed in about six weeks, and not because new facts showed up. The facts had been filed in public the whole time. Somebody finally read the definitions.
In August 2019, WeWork filed its paperwork to sell shares to the public. The business was renting desks: long leases on buildings, short memberships for the people at the desks, and a story that valued the arrangement at 47 billion dollars. The filing told a second story to anyone who read it closely. WeWork’s favorite measure of profit was a number of its own invention called Community Adjusted EBITDA. It started with the revenue, subtracted the costs of running the buildings, and left out general and administrative costs, sales and marketing, and much of what it costs to run the company doing the reporting. On that measure, 2018 was a profitable year, hundreds of millions in the black. On the ordinary measure printed in the same document, WeWork had lost 1.9 billion dollars on 1.8 billion of revenue. Nothing was faked. Both numbers were real. The frame was a definition, and the definition sat in the notes, where definitions live, disclosed to anyone willing to read it.
Run the five questions over it and watch how fast they bite. What was tied to the number? A public offering and a 47 billion dollar valuation. Motive does not come louder. What led to the profit? A metric that excluded the cost of being the company reporting the profit. Compared against what? The older office landlord, IWG, had taken in nearly double the revenue in 2018 and earned an actual profit, and the market valued it at a small fraction of WeWork. The story never volunteered that comparison. Where is the counter-metric? A 1.9 billion dollar loss, in the same filing, one definition away. Headwind or tailwind? A decade of cheap money, lifting every growth story in sight whether it deserved lifting or not. Six weeks after the filing, the offering was withdrawn, the valuation was being cut by tens of billions, and the chief executive was gone. WeWork was rescued that October at a valuation of roughly 8 billion, and it filed for bankruptcy four years later. That is what a framed story looks like when the questions get asked early. The tragedy in most cases is not that the questions are hard. It is how long they wait to be asked.
Last part, and it is the part that keeps the rest honest. I run this sequence on my own work before it goes out. Same order. Same questions. My stories first, while fixing them is still cheap. I am not a hypocrite about it. I do not frame the story; I tell it as it is, and when I have selected something out, the notes say what and why. An audit you only aim at other people is not an audit. It is a weapon with good branding.
A story that survives these questions has earned its clean edges. Most have not. That is what the questions are for.