facts & feelings

Wading into hot button territory? That's not our intent with this piece from Tim Wilson about performance measurement dashboards, but it's almost impossible *not* to write a headline that feels clickbait-y. The reality is that getting an organization aligned and focused on what *results truly matter* leads to a visualization of progress towards those results. And that's useful (even critical)! https://lnkd.in/gibDDJ3s

There is unanimity that effectively crafting and delivering data stories is critical for any organization that wants to be evidence-driven. The devil is in the details, though. What does "data storytelling" actually *mean*? In his latest article for The Focus, Tim Wilson breaks it down into three areas, including calling out why impactful data stories almost always require focus, thought, and alignment before any data is even pulled! https://lnkd.in/gweAAJdK

Every business has a boatload of data that is specific to their business and their customers. That reality drives a tendency to “find the answer in our data” to any question or problem the organization faces. That, in turn, often leads to cumbersome queries, tediously manual data cleanup, a few assumptive leaps, and then a delivery of the “best answer that could be gleaned from our data stockpile.” It often also leads to a companion set of requirements for the data team to gather more data, integrate it better, and do more maintenance to keep it at the highest of quality levels (”If only we’d had…!”). Counterintuitively (perhaps), it seems like <blasphemy>organizations might actually be better off if they had NO data</blasphemy> (or periodically had all of their data wiped out) and then had to be very deliberate about what data—including what TYPE of data—they needed to collect (for a week or a month or a quarter) to address a clearly articulated need. A couple of links in the comments if you'd like to read more on this topic (now you can read it with the sound of my voice in your head; sorry about that).

remember back when annual planning used to be fun? me neither. that was the same for all the leaders I interviewed for this article too! but that's okay, in our opinion it doesn't take too much creativity to imagine a world where leaders can take back control of this box checking exercise to make it truly valuable for their teams. let's talk about it!

What version of your annual planning documents are you on? Give this post a 👍 if it's V3 or higher! Keep in mind as you're pushing through this process that there is a way to take back control of the Annual Planning Process to make it a meaningful activity for you and your team. Read more here from Valerie Kroll on this topic. Also, we'd love to talk to you about it, be sure to reach out! https://lnkd.in/gp964wYp #strategicplanning #budgetszn

ATM Machine. LCD Display. UPC Code. Let's add "Actionable Insights" to the superfluously redundant (see what we did there?) list. Scientists can't be sure of the full etymology of this phrase, but its believed the origin starts around the time business stakeholders started banging their heads against their desks when receiving more dashboards and more reports that didn't help them make a decision. Or was it when analysts cried "uncle!" when a new set of "data questions" were lobbed over the wall with no context? Either way, there's a better way. Focus on business priorities. Deep understanding of the problems hindering outcomes. Objective validation of which ideas work to shrink or solve those problems. We’d love to help create the conditions for you and your team to achieve clarity and alignment on these—this work is elegantly simple, but brutally hard, and sets you up for success! Reach out if you’d like to talk more.

September is for making things happen. Summer is over. Holiday is around the corner, as is the end of the calendar year. A lot happens in September in anticipation of what's to come. Here's our summary of the last month and our view for the next.

In our most recent article on The Focus, Board Chair Matty Wishnow breaks down the ACTUAL cost of yada yada annual planning that you might not be considering. "Why do we say “wait” and then “hurry up” and then “wait” again? Why do we accept that the actual year starts two to three months after the fiscal year begins? Why do we call fifty slide decks with more tactics than goals or budget could reasonably sustain “a plan”? Why do we celebrate approvals and launches more than (instead of) insights and improvements? We do these things because the alternative — focus, alignment and evidence — is hard to come by. Hard, but absolutely not impossible." https://bit.ly/3XUb1XZ

"For the most part, AI does not have original and creative thoughts, nor does it know what actions can feasibly be taken. As a result, in a 'point it at the data and find actionable insights' scenario, it’s operating very much like anomaly detection!" In his latest post, Tim Wilson posits that, as enormously game-changing and powerful as generative AI is for many use cases, when it gets held forth as a way to automate the discovery of actionable insights, extreme skepticism is an appropriate reaction. https://lnkd.in/gVQSbQV6

Is analytics painful? It certainly can be. We fielded a survey to dig into the nature of that pain—from the perspective of analysts and analytics leads as well as from the perspective of their business partners. The results were interesting and, dare we say, useful! https://lnkd.in/dnU7-kYc #analytics #analyticssurvey