The Amazon Leadership Principle “Dive Deep” is a crucial mindset for leaders navigating high-impact Big Bets. Successful Big Bets are defined by their complexity, uncertainty, and scale, which demand that leaders be intimately involved at all levels of execution. A leader’s ability to stay connected to the right details while keeping sight of the broader mission is vital to ensuring clarity, one of the three critical habits of Big Bet Leadership. By auditing frequently and questioning discrepancies between data and anecdotes, leaders can identify and address risks before they derail progress, making “Dive Deep” a powerful tool for creating high-performing teams.
In the context of Big Bets, diving deep allows leaders to anticipate and mitigate risks early, preventing small issues from escalating into major setbacks. In *Big Bet Leadership*, we emphasize that most Big Bets fail due to a “death by a thousand cuts”—a series of small, unchecked problems that accumulate over time. Leaders who practice the Amazon Leadership Principle of “Dive Deep” maintain the velocity of their Big Bets by continuously auditing key details, ensuring that any ambiguity or misalignment is quickly surfaced and resolved. This attention to detail supports the Big Bet habit of prioritizing risk and value, enabling leaders to focus on the most critical elements of success.
Moreover, no task is beneath a leader who truly embodies the “Dive Deep” mentality. In Big Bets, where the stakes are high and the outcomes uncertain, leaders must be willing to roll up their sleeves and engage in the nitty-gritty work. This not only builds trust with the team but also ensures that leaders have firsthand knowledge of the challenges and opportunities within their Big Bet. Operating at all levels is essential to driving transformational success, as it keeps leaders grounded in reality, ensuring that strategic decisions are informed by the details that matter most.
Amazon Leadership Principle — Dive Deep
At Amazon, ownership means accountability. The leader is responsible for the entire lifecycle of a project or transaction and for all its possible outcomes. If you are a leader, you must be willing to go beyond the parameters of your job to improve the customer experience.
The corollary is that leaders understand details and metrics two to three degrees deeper than senior executives at most companies. They are keenly aware of their dependencies and therefore can discuss the details of any given project under their jurisdiction.
One driver of the dive-deep philosophy is the pure, relentless sense of curiosity that Jeff Bezos exemplifies and that he encourages among all those who work for him.
It’s been widely reported that Jeff spends time working in Amazon’s fulfillment centers. This is not just an excellent PR ploy. In fact, Jeff does not generally invite the media to join him on these trips. Jeff likes working alongside the hourly employees because he’s curious about what they have to say and wants to see for himself precisely how efficient the process of fulfilling orders is.
Jeff’s relentlessly inquisitive mind is one of his most prominent and distinctive features, and he demands the same from his people. As a result, experiments are encouraged, but the results must be rigorously measured. This combination of free-thinking and disciplined analysis is very productive and makes diving deep a daily reality at Amazon.
The dive-deep philosophy is also driven by Jeff’s awareness that a company is very much like an ecosystem. It is complex, constantly evolving, and thrives on diversity. This means that numerous possibilities for failure are continually emerging.
For this reason, as any major initiative unfolds at Amazon, Jeff stays as close to the project team and its data as he can, not only monitoring it but also questioning it, poking holes in it, and examining every facet down to the smallest detail. Every leader in the company is expected to behave the same way. Every manager is expected to maintain a strong presence throughout a project’s implementation, making continuous deep dives into the data, the processes, and the performance of every team member. It’s a practice that enables every leader at Amazon to overcome traditional organizational barriers—another form of bureaucracy busting that crashes through the obstacles that might delay or distort progress or learning along the new performance dimensions. Leaders who are constantly digging deep into a challenge—curious leaders—dismantle silos and bureaucracy.
Of course, to dive deep, you need metrics and systems designed to collect and analyze them accurately, consistently, and quickly. Leaders must have a willingness to dive deep, but Amazon’s remarkable culture of metrics provides the data that rewards the effort. As SVP of Consumer Business Jeff Wilkie once said, “Math decisions always trump opinion and judgment. Most corporations make judgment-based decisions when data-based could be made.”1
The desire to dive deep is also why (as I discussed in Chapter 4) Jeff has banned PowerPoint and demands clear decision-making narratives. Putting together a slideshow makes it all too easy for employees to only skim the surface of their ideas while creating the illusion of an intelligent argument. On the other hand, knowing they must publicly present an in-depth essay to their peers and their boss forces them to dive a little deeper. It helps create an atmosphere of accountability because it means that you have to know your stuff when you present to others.
The Five Whys
Working under deadline pressure often feels as if we don’t have enough time to dive deep and truly understand a problem, technology, or situation. There is a balance between knowledge exploration and exploitation; it takes experience to learn when it’s necessary to dive deep and when it’s better to leave things at an abstract or aggregate level. The Five Whys is an iterative question-asking technique we used at Amazon to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. It is so called because experience suggests that five is the number of iterations typically required to identify and fix the true root causes of a problem. Here’s how it works:
- Write a description of the problem. This helps you formalize the problem and helps ensure the entire team understands and is focused on the same problem.
- Ask why the problem happens and write the answer below the problem description.
- If the answer you just provided doesn’t identify the root cause of the problem, ask “why?” again, and write that answer down.
- Loop back through the second and third steps until the team is in agreement that the problem’s root cause has been identified. This may take fewer than five whys or more, depending on the complexity of the problem.
Here’s an example of how the Five Whys might work in practice. Suppose you have suffered from a technology outage. The problem description might read, “Customers were unable to access our service for forty-five minutes on Saturday evening.” When you ask why, the first answer might be, “There was an unprecedented demand from other services.”
However, you and your team might agree that this does not identify the root cause of the service outage. Therefore, you ask a second why, which yields the answer, “Our service was dependent upon another service that could not handle the demand.”
This, in turn, forces you to ask a third why, for which the answer is, “The service we were calling did not meet their service SLA.”
Which leads to a fourth why, whose answer is, “The other service did not have adequate service capacity to meet their SLA.” But so far, this leads us to simply put accountability on someone else. What is our accountability?
And this leads to a fifth why, which elicits the answer, “Because I have not engineered it to handle these conditions and exceptions.”
Ah! And there we have it. Finally, after starting with a vague sense of the cause of the problem that basically boils down to finger-pointing and saying, “It was their fault,” the real answer finally emerges: “I need to engineer my technology service to gracefully handle any condition that it might be required to address. Now, how do we build that?”
By diving deep into the real conditions and managing the dependencies of others, true answers to problems are found.
Rolling Up the Details
The Amazon annual planning process starts in August and wraps in October. It’s an organization-wide deep dive that is designed to create alignment around where resources (including people and capital) are going to be allocated in the coming year. Teams build six-to-eight-page narratives describing their businesses, growth opportunities they envision, their plans for taking advantage of those opportunities, and the resources required.
These narratives work their way up the food chain of leadership, culminating in two-pagers that are read at the S-Team level. At each step of the journey, the narratives are examined at strategy meetings, which start with a 15 to 30-minute period of quiet while everyone reads the plan being reviewed. Then discussion begins, which may be far-ranging or focused on one or two features or capabilities out of several. Armed with the detailed written narrative and all the pre-meeting collaboration required to get to this point, the discussions, and ultimately the decisions, are much deeper and more refined than those that emerge from many corporate planning processes.
The enterprise bias for avoiding PowerPoint presentations in favor of written narratives (typically six pages long, sometimes as short as two pages) is a great example of a forcing-function to create an organization that dives deep. As Bezos noted in a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, “When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences and complete paragraphs, it forces a deeper clarity of thinking.”2 Narratives force clarity, prioritization, and accountability to deliver, and they force your audience to understand at a deeper level.
Conversely, the dumbing-down of organizations and decision-making by overreliance on PowerPoint is well recognized. A retired marine officer voiced his opinions in an essay titled “Dumb-dumb Bullets.” He said, “PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make, and how they make them.”3
The combination of forcing clarity by using narratives and the roll-up process of planning is how Amazon gathers ideas and inputs from throughout the organization, allows innovation to sprout, and brings it all together in order to make the big bets on its future. The moral is clear. At Amazon, no big decision is made without first ensuring that it is based on a deep dive into the underlying details that will determine its success.
“In God We Trust, All Others Must Bring Data”
This well-known management slogan isn’t an Amazon leadership principle, but it could be. The ability to combine data, facts, and a customer-centered approach along with an uncanny ability to dive deep into the details are the fundamental tools of leadership at Amazon.
Dive In
Amazon’s Leadership Principle “Dive Deep” is not just about staying connected to the details; it’s a leadership discipline that drives clarity, mitigates risk, and maintains momentum—especially in the context of Big Bets. Leaders who consistently operate at all levels, audit frequently, and engage directly with their teams foster a culture of accountability and excellence. By questioning when metrics and anecdote differ, and refusing to see any task as beneath them, these leaders ensure their Big Bets stay on course, making the difference between incremental progress and transformative success.
John Rossman is a writer, strategy advisor, and keynote speaker. Have him inspire and teach your team.
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