Strategic Data Science: How To Create Strategic Value From Data Using A Paradox Mindset

Many companies aspire to become data-driven businesses, to use their data strategically and tap into the wealth of potential that data science can provide their business.

However, this mission is filled with tensions and paradoxes.

Here are a few you might have already come across in your business as your move towards digital and data maturity.

• GDPR vs Using customer data
• The benefits vs The cost of being digital and data transformation
• Using the data you have available today vs Building for the future

These tensions and paradoxes can often lead to managers and leaders concluding that they have to choose between one or the other. However, there is another way. One that will create more strategic value for your business.

In this article, I will share with you a new way of looking at these challenges - a Paradox Mindset and how you can use it to create strategic value from data and data analysis in your business.

Based on the cutting edge research by Professor Marianne Lewis, Dean of Cass Business School combined with insight from leading CEOs as part of the Lessons In Leadership Programme, I will explore:

• What is a Paradox Mindset?
• How great leaders can find opportunities in tensions and paradoxes
• How and why to embrace the paradox of innovation
• How to use the Paradox Mindset to create strategic value from data

What Is a Paradox Mindset and Why is it Important?

A Paradox Mindset is “the extent by which one is accepting of and energized by tensions” (Miron-Spektor et al, 2018)

Recent research published in the Academy of Management Journal concluded that the Paradox Mindset is "a key to unlocking the potential of everyday tensions” (Miron-Spektor et al, 2018)

Using the Paradox Mindset, great leaders see and create opportunities in these tensions and paradoxes.

For example, in the case of GDPR, instead of seeing it as a threat to data analysis or as a risk to be managed, a leader with a Paradox Mindset could consider the opportunities GDPR offers to build new relationships with their current and potential customers.

Or in the case of investing in data and data analytics, many leaders see investment as a zero-sum game, where investment in one area, takes away from another. Exceptional leaders embrace this tension and find solutions that grow the total amount of resources available rather than see resources as limited.

The Paradox of Innovation

One way to grow the total amount of resources available is innovation. And in the world of data and analytics, there is a huge need for companies to be continuously innovating. As Professor Marianne Lewis points out, by not innovating you are at risk of being disrupted by the entrepreneurs creating new products in your space.

Within innovation itself, there is an inherent paradox. How to combine incremental innovation (improving what you’re already doing) and radical innovation (the blue sky, big risk projects)?

The Paradox mindset gives us an answer. Find solutions that allow a combination of the two. In fact, in many companies, the gains from incremental innovation pay for the radical innovation.

How to use The Paradox Mindset to create strategic value from data

1. Examine your assumptions around data and data analytics within your organization. Are you seeing conflict or opportunities?
2. Explore opportunities within the tensions and paradoxes within your organization and use them to fuel innovation in how you use data
3. Embrace dynamic balancing. To misuse the famous quote, Leading is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving forward.

What do you think? Does the concept of The Paradox Mindset help as you consider the opportunities in your data? Is it relevant to the challenges you face in your business? I’d love to know.