What are you missing?

There is a great story of the British and US Antarctic stations in the 80s – they were both monitoring the ozone and the Brits thought that they had found a hole in it. They went to the American base with their findings and asked if they had seen anything similar. The Americans had much higher spec technology and said that their data wasn’t showing that there was a hole. This back and forth continued for a while, with the Brits being increasing sure there was a hole but the Americans denying it. Finally someone looked at the settings that the Americans had placed on their technology and discovered that 90% of the data was being ignored as “anomalous results” and the Brits with their pencils and paper calculations had been right all along about the hole in the ozone.

This story has always struck me as telling in two ways. Firstly it reminds us that technology is only ever as good as though using it/ programming it. Secondly we need to make sure that we are seeing the full picture and things aren’t being hidden (intentionally or not). 

It is rare that in a business you would be ignoring 90% of the data that you are receiving, however it is much easier than we think to focus on things that aren’t actually important. This can happen when we are looking at KPIs that aren’t actually the drivers of our business – for example looking at number of leads rather than conversion (or vice versa), or focusses on absolute growth rather than percentage growth (or vice versa).  Or the customer service team might get tasked with answering all queries within 48 hours whilst there is no one doing the work to stop the queries coming in in the first place (often because this feels “more difficult” that just providing reactive answers). 

In my view businesses need to be reviewing their KPIs, dashboards and data regularly. Especially with growing businesses, metrics and parameters that were acceptable even a few months ago can quickly go out of data. It can feel like an unnecessary cost to spend time doing this when things are working “fine” but the longer you leave it, the less relevant your information becomes and the more likely you are to make the wrong decisions.

Have you got examples in your business where you failed to look at all the data and that skewed your results? Are your systems set up based on out of date information? If so, maybe I can help you sort this out and ensure that your data is working as hard as you do