Open: Reach the Answer (The Four Moves — A Field Guide to Data-Driven Decisions)

The finance director asked one question in a routine Tuesday meeting — which customers did the company lose money on last year — and it took nine days, three people, and one spreadsheet to answer. Every number in that spreadsheet had existed since March.

That gap has a name: reach. Not a data problem, not a technology shortfall — a distance, measured in days and permissions, between a question and an answer that already exists somewhere in the building. Open is the first guide in THE FOUR MOVES series, and it shows how to close that distance for one decision path completely, end to end, rather than promising to fix data access everywhere at once.

Drawing on real, cited research — McKinsey's finding that interaction workers lose nearly half the working week to email and internal searching, and industry data on how often businesses decide without the numbers because getting them was too hard — Open gives you:

• A way to calculate what the wait is actually costing, using cost-of-delay math most managers get wrong by an order of magnitude
• The Access Friction Map — a one-page tool for negotiating with any gatekeeper by naming the specific fear behind their "no"
• A worked case (the Meridian series) showing one path opened in eight weeks, and what it did and didn't fix

Each chapter ends with a specific action to try that same week. Read it on its own, or as the first move in the full sequence: Open, Curate, Share, Decide.