“The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn’t know before,” says Hilary Mason, a data scientist and entrepreneur. Although data often becomes overwhelming for people, it is the benchmark for continuous improvement in nearly any area of business, education, leadership, and coaching. Data provides the stories that help leaders improve the plot. Here are five key questions to ask and answer when using data for continuous improvement:
- What data can we collect? Prior to collecting data, it’s important to brainstorm with the team around what data is possible to track with the available time, energy, and resources. While impactful technology exists to track data, not all teams or organizations have those resources. Brainstorming a list of potential options provides insight into the possibilities in order to make an insightful decision.
- Why are we collecting this data? After brainstorming a list, highlight 3-5 metrics that are not only important to collect, but are also easily gathered in your setting. Spend time discussing the specific reasons why these metrics are important to collect. The leader should clearly outline the impact this data has on the larger vision of the organization. Understanding the why provides the purpose behind focusing on that data.
- How efficiently can we gather the data? Once the why and purpose are fully developed for the data, spend time discussing how efficiently this data can be gathered, when it will be collected, and how it’ll be organized. One of the greatest challenges with data is that it becomes too much information in a short amount of time, and leaders often give up on using it for improvement.
- What stories do the data tell us? Once the data are collected and organized, now the work begins in analyzing the specific numbers or ideas. Begin by having all team members brainstorm what stories the data tell or what stories it leaves out. Because raw numbers can be challenging to analyze, creating the stories around the data helps to make it real and impactful.
- How will we improve based on the data? The final step in data use for continuous improvement is deciding what strategies and systems you’ll develop and implement to help improve the numbers. This step often gets overlooked because it’s the hard part of improving an area of weakness. Develop a clear, actionable system that helps move the needle prior to analyzing the data again to evaluate progress.
Data for continuous improvement is one difference maker in high-performing teams. They often leave no stone unturned in trying to improve their systems to achieve better results. The challenge with data, however, is that it becomes overwhelming if there isn’t a system in place for collecting, analyzing, and using it for improvement. Asking and answering these five questions helps create a simplified way to use the data.
What is your system for collecting, analyzing, and using data for improvement?