Rule #6 - Provide Visibility
On flying a plane, playing a video game and measuring reality.
Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter, this is part six of a ten part series sharing the Happy Medium 10 Rules for Staying Lean (and Stress Free).
Provide visibility - Today!
Trust
Culture
Understand before you act, but do act
Switching costs you
Rule #6: Provide Visibility
Create visibility from within a system, don’t hide information behind manual reports. Avoid time spent translating, make it possible to self serve relevant data.
Information is power
Data is important.
But some organisations fall into the trap of worshipping data, turning it over endlessly in reports, presentations and dashboards. Refusing to move forward without it while simultaneously hiding it under a million layers of systems and translations.
Every time you abstract the data from it’s original source, you add time (the time it takes to create a powerpoint or spin up a dashboard), introduce risk for error (an incorrect filter or baked in bad data quality) and remove the transparency between cause and effect (the resulting metric is so far removed from the actual event it is supposed to measure).
This is particularly the case in large organisations, where systems are added upon systems to generate scorecards, reports and dashboard. You end up in a situation where you are drowning in data but have no insights. The data has become abstracted, it is now a number that tells you how something is “performing” but leaves you with nothing to do about it.
Good data tells you something.
If you have ever played a video game, you understand what it is like to have real-time data about your performance. It gives you information and an indication of what levers you need to adjust to improve your performance - you can adjust your accuracy, speed or skills and receive instant feedback as to whether your changes made an impact.
While real-time might be ambitious, your data should be able to tell you how you’ve performed and how to adjust the levers to improve. If this data is coming through 1 or 2months after you’ve completed the task, what use is that to you?
Importantly, this is not about panicking and switching every time we see something going poorly though (see switching costs). Like our video game metaphor, the goal remains the same, to finish the race efficiently - even just having visibility of the data puts activities into perspective. It means you aren’t flying blind, you can see when you’re on track and when you’re drifting.
Remove barriers to information
If your company relies on each project being profitable in order to survive (and most do), yet you are hiding how profitable a project is from your team - or worse, sharing it once a year in a performance review - you will never make a meaningful improvement. How is anyone supposed to improve their profitability if they don’t know what it is?
There is a huge benefit in being as transparent as possible and working from the same information. The team should be able to see how their performance contributes to the wider goals.
If sharing data with your team feels a little scary, interrogate why. Make sure you accompany that transparency with explanation and support, help people feel safe and understand the big picture goals. Empower people to self serve the data that will help them do a good job. Don’t gate keep data.
Invest in systems that can give you data, easily and as quickly as possible.
To have close to real-time, meaningful and accurate data you need a tech stack that can provide data from the source instantly. For example, if you want to track income, your software should instantly update the minute a purchase is made - no manual interventions and certainly no spreadsheets.
If you want to learn how to find a software solution that will give you the data you need to make good decisions, check out Automate your Admin. If you want me to match you up with the right tool for the job, check out Software Matchmaking.
Remember Goodhart’s law - “Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure”
Always remember that a data point is a single perspective on a real-life event. The moment that the goal becomes to improve the metric, rather than improve the actual event, is the moment it’s no longer useful.
For example, if you want to target efficiency, you might set a target of x hours per project. If it’s too low, you have deliverables being rushed to meet the target, too high and people will fill up the time available leaving you with an unrealistic view of capacity. The metric has become the target.
Even the most balanced metrics will carry this risk, so it’s important to always remember what the greater goal is.
Like an aeroplane, all the dials and gauges are there to give you critical information, but at the end of the day, it’s up to you to fly the plane.
Further reading:
A good example of Goodhart’s law (and a good read), Experimental History’s How to drive a stake through your own good heart
That is a lot of data chat so here is a palate cleanser to remind us that some success has no real data point (I can always find a link 😉) - The realities of being a pop star by Charlie XCX
This is part six of a ten part series on how to be lean, if you aren’t already subscribed, you know what to do. Missed a week? You can catch up here and get a preview of what’s coming up!
That’s it for this week!
If you’re enjoying the weekly, please share with someone else who might enjoy it too.
Otherwise, if you aren’t already, subscribe to get these in your inbox every week or catch up on previous weeks below!