Lead the Horse to Water
When you, as I do, find yourself talking about training measurement over and over, themes emerge. Some of these are so important that they get a certain rhythm in the telling…they are almost poetic. OK yes, I’m a geek for this stuff. I actually like talking about measurement in organizations, but still. The poetry makes me smile.
One of the most common of these is that I have found most organizations to be “data rich and action poor.” Has a nice ring to it, no?
But poetry and rhythm aside, I believe this is true. As a random corporate drone, I have sat in my cubicle and looked at reports for which I was one of a zillion people on a distribution list. These reports were often beautiful. Colorful graphs lined up like soldiers standing at attention with crisp bright uniforms.
And silent. The soldiers were also silent. Which is to say, the charts were presented as graphic representations of data, but entirely lacking interpretation.
Now, one could make the argument (and many have) that it’s the report recipients’ responsibility (say THAT five times fast) to draw conclusions about the data and usually the report creator has spent so much time with the data that the conclusions are obvious: the equivalent of the uniformed soldier smacking the reader on the noggin with the butt of a rifle.
But I’m going to go ahead and say that the emperor has no clothes. I’m not scared. The vast majority of these reports that arrived in my cube, were little more than an ocean of numbers in which I paddled around looking for meaning for about 3 minutes (if I had extra time on my hands). But more often than not, if the report didn’t come from my boss accompanied by a little red exclamation point, it got filed for future reference (which is to say “ignored”).
My point, and I do have one, is that the purpose of a report is to communicate. This is not art and we are not Leonardo DaVinci painting a cryptic smile on a woman that can be interpreted any number of ways. We are busy folks and we are communicating to busy folks and if we don’t lead those horses to water, they’ll likely wander around the pasture bonking into fences.
(If you have been skimming this posting so far, here is where you should slow down and read) In order to communicate clearly, it is the report creator’s responsibility to interpret every report, every chart and graph, and to include a clear statement about what the report represents.
- “Product sales are generally on the rise, but have leveled off this month.”
- “Employee utilization is low this month, but still on target for the quarter.”
- “Customer satisfaction is down in three of five divisions and flat in the other two.”
It will often seem, as report creators, that these are painfully obvious statements. But I consistently find that what seems obvious to the person who’s just spent a full day structuring a data set is often not at all obvious to the person who has (literally) less than a minute to comprehend a report.
The best part is when someone looks at the report, reads my summary statement and disagrees with it! While this may not seem at first blush to be the best part, it means I’ve accomplished my goal; namely to have report recipients engage with the data enough to form an informed opinion. Yay!
Not that this means one should deliberately draw inaccurate conclusions on reports…folks will believe that you’re obtuse and no one wants that.
OK, much rambling. Here’s the gist (sorry skimmers): Vow today to produce no report without also producing a conclusion about what story the data tells. Similarly, when you receive a report, vow to email back to the sender if there is no interpretation. “Marv, thanks so much for sending this. Before I review the report in detail (yeah, right), what conclusion do YOU draw from this?”
Because of course, coming back to “data rich and action poor”, the purpose of all this data and all this reporting is to take action. So the implied question is “what should I do with this data?”. Unless someone looks at the report and takes some sort of action, then it may as well be a weather report. Interesting to know what sort of storm is coming (or more likely, in organization reports, what storm has just passed), but no ability to do anything about it.
~Geek~
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