Focus on Data in the Decision Making Process

Hi, everybody. Tim Keefe here, and today's topic is decision making.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with clients over the last few years. It's fascinating to me how companies will talk about the need to be agile, dynamic. They need to meet their customers where the customer wants to be met. 

And yet, many of these same companies struggle with the effective decision-making to make those changes. Let's face it. Change is hard, and change is risky. If we don't change, we may be able to kind of ride it out, but eventually, things will change out from underneath us. 

So one of the things that I think many of us need to do in our roles is how do we help those responsible for decision-making make those decisions in a data-driven way, wherever possible. 

A big part of that is our ability to bring forward data to demonstrate or at least reflect or infer the value of that change. Again, recognizing that change can occur because of changes in the marketplace, changes in our product offering, changes in customer demand, or even other external issues, like a pandemic with changes in tax laws. 

All of this requires organizations to have people in place that understand the data, understand what they're looking at, and understand the organization's goals. And also that we have the ability to measure our effectiveness of change. 

I work with client after client who will walk in and say what initiatives are underway in your organization, and I'll get a spreadsheet with 50 to 100 initiatives on it. 

Often, I would come back six months or a year later, and that entire list would still be in place with no real progress. I mean, yeah, there's been meetings, and people have done different documents and put together presentations.

However, something is missing in terms of really moving forward and either executing on an initiative, taking it out of production, or even understanding where it is and its impact on other underway initiatives. 

So I think the message here is when in doubt, focus on data. Try to avoid anecdotal evidence, avoid extrapolating your own experience as everybody's experience, but use data to influence what we're going to do when we're going to do it and the expected output of that work. 

Thanks for reading.