Data needs to help us understand people, behavior and decision making
Organizations keep collecting lots of information, yet they rarely get the outcomes they want for their customers and employees.
Why does this keep happening?
Well, one reason may be that organizations lack a deep behavioral understanding to how people make decisions and behave, and in turn they may lack an understanding of how they should be working on the policies, incentives, rules and systems within the organization to support change.
This is not something that is taught in management classes or in business books, at least not in depth - there is mention of behaviors everywhere, there is less mention of how you approach them, what levers there are, how social norms influence, how important belief strength is and so on...
If we are to make anything useful of all the data (and not just be another report that scratches the surface), we need to be able find the nuances and translate our findings into practical strategies that can be used in our specific context.
Organizations need to start being comfortable drilling down into specific and contextual behaviors and into the barriers and levers they have to change behavior.
That means looking at all the factors from social influences, goals, skills, knowledge, emotions, beliefs and so on... because a strategy that targets skills and knowledge is not going to be the same as one that targets a belief.
So remember, data collection is needed, but not for the sake of putting report that will collect dust together - it should be used to make actionable strategies to help people make progress and have better experiences.
That is how we approach it and hopefully it should be how you approach it as well...