Once during a workshop break, a senior vice president from a Fortune 100 company approached me.
He said, “You know Brad, our company collects and processes more data than almost any other company in the world.” He was proud of this fact. Not wanting to deflate him, I gently replied, “That’s interesting but home come you always seem to be two steps behind your competitors?”
Having a lot of data doesn’t make an organization data-driven. Neither does talking about or presenting a lot of data. Even generating insights, often described as the holy grail of analytics, doesn’t guarantee that a company is data-driven.
The key word in data-driven is “driven”.
A data-driven company turns data and insight into action. More importantly, it does so quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
Think about these well-known disasters of the last thirty years:
· 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster[1]
· 1986 Chernobyl Meltdown[2]
· 2005 Katrina Devastation of New Orleans[3]
· 2007 Global Financial Meltdown[4]
· 2010 Hunza River Valley Landslide[5]
· 2011 Fukushima Meltdown[6]
Each of these events had two things in common.
- There were data and analysis predicting the disaster.
- It happened anyway.
If you are not turning data into action, it’s no different than not having it in the first place. Unfortunately too many organizations, in the spirit of being “data-driven”, never get past the data.
Even if your organization is making data-driven decisions, it might not be enough.
You need to do it quickly. As Jeff Bezos pointed out in his 2016 Annual Shareholder letter[7]:
“Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. . . Speed matters in business” (Note: In case you are not familiar with his definition, this is what Bezos said about Day 2 companies: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”)
Where is most of your time spent? Where do most of your discussions focus? What takes up the most slides in your presentations? If the answer is data and analysis rather than decisions and actions, it’s time to make a change.
Don’t give up your data. Just move past it to its true value: action. And, do so as fast as you can.
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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors. Avail’s Rethinking Data workshop helps leaders close the gap between analysis and action. Contact Brad at brad.kolar@availadvisors.com.
[1] Pasternack, Alex. Was Space Shuttle Challenger a Casualty of Bad Data Visualization? Motherboard. Jan 27 2012, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbb3qz/could-better-data-design-have-prevented-challenger, Web.
[2] Dörner, Dietrich. The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub., 1997. Print.
[3] LaFrance, Adrienne. Disasters That Were Foretold, The Atlantic, Sep 4 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/09/hurricane-katrina-and-other-preventable-disasters/401123/, Web.
[4] Lewis, Michael. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
[5] LaFrance, Adrienne. Disasters That Were Foretold, The Atlantic, Sep 4 2015, Web.
[6] LaFrance, Adrienne. Disasters That Were Foretold, The Atlantic, Sep 4 2015, Web.
[7] Bezos, Jeff. 2016 Letter to Shareholders, Apr 12, 2017, https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t, Web.
