I’ve spent my career filling in spreadsheets, generating reports and putting together presentations. I’ve got more slides than an aqua park but unfortunately slides from finance are way less fun. What I’ve learnt is that a lot of people don’t dive deeply into the data before making a decision.
Data is collected everywhere we go and there’s no way to escape the reach of ‘big data’. But how many times have you heard that a great leader ‘trusted their gut’ or ‘had great instincts’? Quite a few, I’d wager.
In fact, in the report Guts & Gigabytes, data and analytics was ranked as only the third most important part of the decision making process for leaders (23%), behind a staggering 72% who put their own intuition and experience in front.
The reason behind this, according to about 40% of leaders surveyed, is that they’re worried about the accuracy, quality and completeness of the data they have. They also worry about information overload. This is something that is even more prevalent in the UK, where a massive 61% of British leaders said that the use of data had actually been detrimental to their business in the past.
Data seems messy, rambling and confusing and it’s easy to get lost in the vastness and complexity. When you’re peering into the murky depths, it’s no big surprise that sometimes you can see something that looks like it’s gold, but turns out to be an old drink can.
If we can’t trust our data, then how are we supposed to make good, informed decisions? This lack of trust then takes us back to the one thing that we can trust – our gut. We’ll take experience and we’ll fit what worked before to the problem in front of us. This feels safe, familiar and quite comforting.
The reality is that the whole purpose of a clean dashboard or report is to make data accessible and understandable for anyone. This can be data to help guide sales people, output metrics for the staff on the shop floor or an output to feed to HMRC for taxes. Your business probably already has the info, so all that is needed is a way to put it into something that’s easier to digest.
So, is data your friend? I suspect that it isn’t at the moment because the two of you are speaking different languages. You need a translator, something that interprets what the data is trying to tell you and puts it into the efficient, clean short-hand of business to help guide you. Similar to your gut, using a bit of translation, you can use the past to inform the future but in different ways that your gut couldn’t possibly know.
If that sounds like something that you might need, then hire a data translator like me to work with the data and show you the world that your gut might just be missing.
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