at work we’re spending some time thinking about where we are, as an organization, on the pathway to creating “an analytics culture shaped around better and faster decision making.” i stumbled across this article, The Evolution of Decision Making: How Leading Organizations Are Adopting a Data-Driven Culture, which identifies five stages to evolving into a data-driven culture. They are:
- Over-reliance on managerial judgement such as intuition and instincts.
- Siloed use of analytics in a few departments
- Expanding use of analytics in several departments, noted by an increasing amount of collaboration
- Scaling decision making throughout all ranks of the organization in an integrated, holistic approach
- Continuous improvement built on an evolving culture
i think this stuff is fascinating. and not just because of the utility behind using data to help inform decision making. i find it interesting because working to understand the organizational psychology behind making these kind of culture shifts in the workplace reveals so much about humans, how we think about things, how our views shift, how we respond when we feel threatened, that kind of thing.
this is 100% one of those situations where i’m not at all sure about what i can do to get us to where i’m pretty sure we need to go… but i’m totally up for the challenge.
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on a separate, but related note: can i just say that i think that we, as a culture, need to take a hard look at how we measure success in life. i think we often cling to measuring the quantity of a thing, over the quality of the thing. an obvious example of this is marriage or relationships. “Married 50 years! What an accomplishment!” i’m more interested in talking about the quality of that relationship, not how long it lasted. bitter and long lasting? that’s tragic, no?
my father died when i was 19. i had 19 years with the person i effortlessly describe as my favorite person on the planet. nineteen years isn’t a lot of time, but it was great. those were 19 great years. please don’t call that a failure because it didn’t last forever.
and work too. “Thirty years of service! That’s something to celebrate!” maybe it is. but more and more these days i wonder if some of this could be attributed to the desire to play it safe, or lack of imagination.
T’s friend has a riff off of Hanlon’s razor (“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”) that pokes at the ineffectiveness of incentive structures. the other day i riffed off of that riff and offered “never mistake for commitment that which can be explained by fear of moving on.”
quality matters in life. let’s start celebrating that more.
eleven bee 