Friday Fifteen #1: Start Where You Are
I’m experimenting with a new way of focusing my writing practice. For the next six weeks, I’m blocking out 45 minutes every Friday for a quick write. Fifteen minutes to collect my thoughts, fifteen minutes to draft, fifteen to edit. Fifteen minutes isn’t a lot of editing time, so I’m hoping that the comparative lack of polish will help me frame these as “thinking out loud” for myself. I spend a reasonable amount of time taking in ideas and information every week, so by doing this on Fridays, I’m curious to see how this might help me synthesize and clarify my own thoughts.
Changing a habit or building a skill in a single person takes repeated efforts, and consistency. On an individual level, we know from research in psychology and neurobiology that changing existing behaviour patterns, or developing new skills requires both extended repetition and consistency. On an organisational level, it’s not dissimilar. Collective patterns, process, and development add layers with magnifying power. In learning science we talk about building automaticity. How long does it take to build the skill of consistently rerouting to a new process flow, or outcomes that meet a strategic goal? Depends on the quality and consistency of the skill building practice. No matter where you’re trying to go in the future, it helps tremendously to start by knowing where you are in the present.
Data and people analytics are essential tools for understanding our starting place. We can plan more strategically, create greater, more sustainable impact, when we have this as a foundation to start from. The process of integrating change can be dynamic. Just like on a journey, signposts help. Speedometers show us how fast we’re going on the highway, the ubahn app shows us where the delays are on the route. They help us maintain awareness of where we’re at so we can make more informed choices about our journey. And, they show us when we’ve reached milestones. Gathering and engaging with specific data on a regular basis creates signposts to inform our navigation.
As a tool, people analytics gives us the ability to track behavior, experience, and outcomes in a measurable way. The data itself doesn’t give us the whole picture. Data is information about the experiences, performance, and outcomes in your organisation. The people are where those experiences, performance, and outcomes come from. The more effectively change journeys contextualise their data in the human basis of the work, the greater the scale of possible success. Katarina Berg calls this “data is your detective, not your dictator.” Tempting though it can be to look at it in isolation, change that really integrates and sustainably transforms an organisation looks at data as reference points. It is most valuable as the wireframe of the piece, not as the piece itself.