Data Wins Arguments
In the busy world of business seniority tends to over rule in decisions that have no data.
The more experienced and senior members of teams have more sway in decision making as they offer opinions and ideas and too often they are incorrect. They are assumptions based in history, bias or a lack of new thinking.
I work with senior teams all the time and see this pattern. The founder, CEO or “old heads” will refer back to what happened or didn't happen in the past or what they think. This is often driven by the desire to avoid change because as humans we all hate having to get uncomfortable. New team members voice their views and ideas that are worth exploring but are simply dismissed and at its worst this creates a culture that resists change. It creates a significant risk that the organisation will be irrelevant in the near future.
SHIFTING THE DISCUSSION
At its worst countless hours are spent talking about opinions as if they are facts. One of the lessons I have learnt is that “Data wins Arguments”. Data takes the discussion from “I think” to one of “Let me show you”. It shifts the conversation to one that will get a good solid outcome. It takes emotion and bias out of the equation. It leads to data driven and robust business decisions. The role of a leader is to disrupt business as usual in a good way so that the company adapts and thrives in the future. Data can create a huge mandate for change by exposing current future reality.
This is the impact of KPI's, financial trend graphs, research, analysis of patterns and numbers. A simple exercise of graphing the monthly, year to date and lifetime revenues of your top 20 clients and having your team sit together and discuss what they see can have a huge aligning effect and can completely shift thinking, perceptions and provides clarity of the actual reality.
This TED talk is worth watching as it outlines just how wrong we get it if we don't seek data about what media shows us. The gap can be huge and in fact chimpanzees can be more accurate if we don't look for the numbers and validate our perceptions.
HIGH PERFORMANCE LEADERS GO WELL BEYOND EMOTION, PERCEPTION. THEY ARE AWARE OF THE IMPACT OF DATA AND SEEK IT TO GET BETTER BUSINESS DECISIONS.
This blog was written by Kendall Langston, Strategic Advisor at Advisory Works.
#datawinsarguments, #leadership, #betterbusinessdecisions #strategicexecutionpartner
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