Behavior Is the Blind Spot in Business Intelligence

I’ve spent years building organizations that rely on data to make informed decisions. However, when it came to people—especially regarding culture, performance, and trust—I often found myself guessing more than I realized or accepting others' insights as accurate. The insights that truly mattered weren’t on our dashboards, not because we didn’t want them, but because they weren’t being measured, and we didn’t even know we could measure them.

We measure performance. We measure engagement. We measure outputs. We measure everything but the one thing that drives them all: behavior.

Most BI dashboards are filled with outcome data—things that have already happened. They’re helpful, but they’re downstream. They don’t explain why trust eroded, why a team lost momentum, or why one function resists change while another embraces it.

Behavior is the root layer—and we’ve treated it like a black box.

I’ve been there. I’ve led large teams and seen dashboards full of green bars while the undercurrent was quietly pulling us in the wrong direction right before our eyes. It wasn’t until I started mapping actual behavior—how people showed up, made decisions, and adapted under pressure—that the full picture came into focus. It’s like turning on the lights in a dark room.

Behavior isn’t soft; it’s structural. It determines how work gets done.

And if you’re not seeing it, you're not seeing the full system.

So here’s the question: What if your business intelligence started at the root, not just the surface?

Stay tuned for the next article in this series.