How does one even begin to recognize and then collect the necessary data that will enable us to first define the problem and then to analyze it? Restated: How does one go about isolating what is relevant to the problem and what is not relevant from the undifferentiated flow of activities or actions or states of existence that we confront in a real-life situation?
One of the easiest and most effective ways to think of the world as data is from the reporter’s point of view. The job of a reporter is to tell a story, a story based on facts. The reporter collects facts mostly by asking questions. This an excellent starting point for the business manager as well. In this unit we will use the 5 W’s-plus one extra - as a strategy to help us see the world as data: Who, what, when, where, why and how. Although we will be using the 5W’s+H, or a selected subsets of them, as a thinking strategy throughout the book, they may take on different meanings and emphases in different sections of the book, depending on whether we are doing the initial work of defining the problem, or creating a plan and timeline to carry out the project or using a particular mathematical technique to analyze the data or writing a memo to convey the results of our analysis. The point is that while it is important to be able to roll the 5W’s+H off the tongue, it is also important to be aware that not only will we not always talk about all of them all the time but that even when we do we may not be thinking of them in quite the same way from situation to situation. Then too, the W’s are not necessarily mutually exclusive, meaning that, for example, there may be situations in which it does not make sense to ask What? without asking Where? in the same breath or How? without asking When?