The 6Qs: A Smarter Way to Plan, Create, and Deliver Engagements
As outlined in my earlier posts – organizations don’t struggle because they have too much information. They struggle because that information can’t be reused, governed, or automated. Solving this requires a way to describe engagement data so it can be used across silos and purposes.
The 6Qs is a solution to this problem. Six facets—Who, What, Where, When, Why, How—that, when properly used, provide a universal data framework that is elegantly simple and intuitively understandable.
The 6Qs is Universal
One framework to describe all engagements can feel impossible. Too simple, and it’s useless. Too complex, and it collapses under its own weight. This is exactly why business silos develop bespoke frameworks. Each silo has different data requirements and ends up building its own schema, limiting data reuse and increasing internal friction.
The 6Qs sidesteps this outcome. Instead of replacing silo frameworks, it works with them by adding a mapping layer of shared facets and classifications. In other words, the 6Qs doesn’t change data, it describes data. Teams keep the terms and processes they’re used to; 6Qs adds a common description so segments, filters, and automations can be applied on top, without altering source data.
A shared set of facets and classifications is possible because every engagement, no matter the context, is about someone (WHO) engaging with something (WHAT), somewhere (WHERE), at some time (WHEN), for some reason (WHY), through some action of the business (HOW).
Break engagements into these six facets and commonalities emerge. While every engagement is unique, they all use some combination of the same target audiences, materials, engagement points, calendar events, objectives, and playbooks. By isolating each facet, we can build sets of governed, facet-specific categories and classifications that are shared by every engagement.
The 6Qs is Simple
If the goal is one framework to describe all engagements, simplicity is non-negotiable. The variety and number of engagements to account for is too large. A small business can see thousands of marketing, sales, product, and service engagements per week; a large enterprise can see millions of engagements per day. If the framework isn’t simple, the organization will pivot back to a morass of custom, bespoke classifications.
The 6Qs applies the principle of emergent properties to this challenge. By capturing a small set of simple, governed facts across WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, and HOW, those facts can be combined to produce a virtually unlimited number of meaningful descriptions of any engagement. When these facts are linked, unique and complete descriptions emerge—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
To demonstrate, a typical business may utilize around 200 separate classifications per each of the 6Qs facets – or approximately 1,200 terms total. This relatively small number of terms can be assembled into more than 3 trillion unique combinations, more than enough to meet the needs of even the largest business.
By describing engagements facet by facet, and by breaking each facet into granular classifications, a small number of simple terms can describe any engagement.
The 6Qs is Understandable
A framework that requires a lot of work to learn and use will never gain wide acceptance. The 6Qs leverages its granularity to break descriptions down into basic, plain-English terms anyone can intuitively understand.
For example, consider a common marketing engagement—seeing a paid banner ad on a website.
A common tag might be “June 25 WSJ takeover banner.” That tag conveys some information—it’s a banner, it maybe ran in June, it appeared somewhere on WSJ.com. But if you weren’t part of the team executing the campaign, this tag is not only easy to misinterpret but lacks much of the context needed to reuse any data associated with the engagement.
The 6Qs delivers a more complete description. With the 6Qs every business user would know this about the engagement:
It was a banner ad (800×1200) with the headline “Your trusted partner,” blue background, approved on June 20, 2025.
It ran in paid media on the WSJ.com homepage takeover using a rich-media banner template.
Anyone who clicked was assigned to an observed-behavior segment: visitors originating from this banner on WSJ.com.
The engagement date was August 15, 2025.
The insertion was funded by the Spring Media Budget Allocation to support the Q2 Brand Push campaign (objective: keep the brand top-of-mind with core audiences).
It was executed using the standard paid-media banner playbook designed for awareness.
The Outcome
The 6Qs is an elegant solution to several intractable problems.
Siloed teams can operate independently and successfully leveraging data from other silos.
A small, finite, and governable set of classifications can describe every engagement.
Accurate engagement context is easy to interpret and use correctly.
How and where to apply the 6Qs are topics for other articles. For now, it is enough to say that as a universal framework it has applications across the enterprise and that everyone in the enterprise is responsible for collecting, describing and using data correctly.
But just as a universal framework enables everyone to understand data, a universal framework lends itself to universal solutions to collect and use the data.
If you’d like to explore how the 6Qs framework can help streamline your marketing operations or improve data governance, I’d love to connect. Drop me a note here or on on LinkedIn or to start the conversation.
