In Your Shoes: the Executive

In Your Shoes, No. 1  ·  For: chief executives, directors and senior leaders  ·  Reading time: 5 min

Twelve minutes, four versions of the truth.

You have a decision to make by Friday. You ask for the numbers. Three people send three answers. By the time they are reconciled, the decision has been made on instinct.

We have worked alongside senior leaders for 25 years. Their pain is rarely a lack of data. It is a lack of data they can trust, in time, tied to a decision.

What the research suggests

• In a study of business leaders by the Financial Times, 74% said they had at some point held back a decision because they were not sure which data to trust.
• Gartner’s 2026 survey of more than 400 CEOs points to a growing trust gap between technologists and other business leaders when handling new initiatives.
• McKinsey has reported that executives spend around 40% of their time making decisions, and believe much of that time is poorly used.

Treat these as signals, not laws. They match what we hear.

What leaders say they want

It comes in different words, but it is always these three things.

• Fewer numbers. Five that matter, not fifty.
• Numbers with an owner, a date and a source. So nobody argues about where it came from.
• A straight view of what changed, and what to do. With the trade-offs, not a single answer pretending to be certain.

What we built

An executive view that fits on one page. Five numbers, each sitting beside the decision it informs. Each number shows who owns it, where it comes from and when it was last checked. Status is shown by shape and word, never colour alone. Below the numbers: the three decisions due, who owns each and by when.

Show and tell: a sample executive view. The numbers are illustrative, not client data.

AI helps us explore the data and draft the what-changed note. Humans decide what the numbers mean, and a named person signs off. We say where AI was used.

Three questions to ask your team this week

• Who owns this number?
• When was it last checked, and against what?
• Which decision does it inform?

If the answer to the third question is none, take it off the page.

Why we built it

For nonprofit senior leadership in Canada, we built a separate executive dashboard alongside our board governance dashboard. For companies and teams anywhere, the same approach is available through B4A Studio.

Have data? Let us talk