Learning spike. After getting a sense of a problem, drill deeply into the problem by talking to as many folks involved as possible. Focus on talking to folks across functions and to whoever is directly doing the work. Avoid spiking with folks whose job it is to summarize other people’s work, although these folks are often the best place to get a list of folks to talk with. Spikes work because they bypass the existing information hierarchy. Hierarchy is great at condensing too much information into a narrative, but narratives are crafted by selecting information. Selection implies omission, and sometimes a well-meaning narrative omits essential data. Avoid all this by going straight to the source.