What is quality information?

In this moment, what are you aware of in your business? Perhaps you are nervous about presenting to the board tomorrow. Or maybe there is ongoing conflict between two of your key reports. Potentially the business is on track to have the highest month of sales on record. Or perhaps you are wondering what key processes drive the ability of the business to sustain itself.

The above four sentences represent four different views a business owner could take on their business:

First person personal, I, the business owner.

Second person inter-personal, we, the business team.

Third person, it, the performance of the business at a static point in time.

Fourth person, its, the business in terms of its systems and the systems it plays a part in.

How aware of these perspectives are you and of your preferences toward some over others? Are any of these perspectives completely outside of your awareness and potentially a blindspot for you?

Business owners today have the opportunity to be more aware of their business than ever before thanks to the visibility that increased data availability offers them. All kinds of data on internal performance and customer behaviour is now available and it all promises to be current, accurate and relevant. Do you have a clear idea of what information is most relevant to the success of your business? How do you know to call it relevant?

What to measure

What your business measures determines how you and your team make decisions on where to allocate resources; resources in the form of energy, time and money. How do you determine what gets measured? Data and numbers are held up as being unbiased objective proof of what is happening; whilst that may be true the decision of what data gets measured is often highly subjective. Often I find that the data I am assigning the most importance to is that which confirms my own opinions and emotions. Some of which include:

• What I personally feel passionate about,
• People of interest to me and their opinions,
• Compliance with external authorities,
• Fear of possible worst case scenarios.

When I realise that I am giving my attention to information on this highly subjective basis I quickly step out of my personal first person point of view and step into the other three perspectives to seek for information and gain more perspective. Not only does this change what information I value it also changes the meaning of the information. Most significantly it switches my assessment of the information from whether it is relevant to me to whether it is relevant to the current needs of the business, its purpose and its long term vision.

Assessing the quality of information

It is important to remember that all information is meaningless; it is us humans that give it meaning. This is what makes information vulnerable to the same generalisations, distortions and deletions that our subjective memory is. When assessing the quality of information you are receiving consider how the information was collected and what filtering process it went through before it got to you. Then consider whether it’s useful to the business.

Three useful questions to ask when assessing the quality of information feeding back from your employees, supply partners and customers are:

1. What kind of human intervention was there in the collecting of the data?
2. Do the people intervening have an intention other than accuracy?
3. Does this information give an accurate account of where the business is today in relation to the purpose and vision of the business?

Perhaps a simpler and more powerful test you can do is to ask yourself,

“does this information clarify or obscure my perspective on the state of the business and how it fulfils its purpose?”

Asking for numbers

There can be an initial resistance to asking team mates, supply partners and customers for numbers. I have experienced people interpret this as a questioning of their word or their expertise. This is not the case and it is important that the intention of asking for data or objective information is understood and made clear; to improve the way the business delivers value to its stakeholders. Depersonalising information leads to less defensive meetings and opens up the feedback lines of communication so that business processes can be continuously improved.

The key difference that makes the difference is that numbers don’t belong to anyone. They can be raised, critically investigated and expanded from multiple perspectives without anyone needing to take it personally. This is not the case with opinions, intuitions, instincts and even qualified expertise.

Balance both for clarity and agility

In any case it is not a matter of subjectivity versus objectivity and one being always preferable to the other. What is important is that there is a balance of both and that you are choosing which perspective to take in order to serve the purpose and the vision of the business. For example expressing an opinion in the form of recommending a course of action is very valuable to the business. Showing the numbers that describe what lead you to offer the recommendation allows everyone to assess the course of action objectively in relation to the business objectives. This leads to greater alignment and shared purpose.

I have also noticed that workplaces become more agile as they operate less from the basis of expert opinion and more from the critical observation of objective data. Perhaps this is because individuals are less likely to feel attached to data than they are to an opinion that they have formed themselves and this keeps them flexible. I’d like to see some data before making that my conclusion.