When Data Crunches You
Ever since Good to Great hit the scene, the association community has gotten data religion. Count this, measure that, does this metric make my balanced score card look fat? The problem with too much data collection is that you can be paralyzed by an undifferentiated mass of input. You become the crunchee rather than the cruncher.
Repeat after me: If a piece of data can’t enable a decision to be made, it isn’t worth measuring. Using this simple rule will dramatically reduce your measurement efforts while simultaneously enabling you to take more action. What’s not to like?
This same approach can be invaluable for your Board of Directors and other leadership bodies. When you are pressed for more and more data, push back. Ask what decisions the requested data will support. If it doesn’t support any, it is in everyone’s best interest to not go through the labor of producing it nor the time of assessing and discussing it. You can move on to those metrics that really matter to your leaders making decisions about the future of the organization.
Do not allow your measurement efforts to crunch you and your leadership.
Agreed! Some data can be good, e.g. if it enables a conversation to go from abstract to action, but I find people tend to be great at asking for data (causing you-know-who to have to scramble for it), then do nothing with it after they get it. Nothing irritates me more…
Well stated! I once had an ED who held two (not one, but two) masters degress in engineering. He LOOOOVED data. I spent an afternoon providing some data to him that he meticulously turned into Excel graphs and charts. When I asked him what he was going to DO with the charts, his response was “Nothing. But these look really cool.”
I love the meetings where more data is requested, it gets provided at the next meeting, and then more data is requested. I’ve been through that more times than I can count. I’m convinced it’s a strategy for inaction. Sometimes you just have to pull the trigger. David you make a good suggestion - asking what’s this going to give us that could change where we’re headed.
You’re exactly right, Kristi (and Wes’ story gives a good example). You have to ask that question before you start measuring, making it a key part of your overall project planning.
[…] Done It That Way blog appears to have made a direct hit on the pitfalls of being too data-oriented: When Data Crunches You. Several comments so far and […]
[…] When Data Crunches You […]