It is no doubt a sign of progress that a significant proportion of organizations and managers today appear to feel guilty when they admit that they are making big management decisions in an intuitive rather than evidence-based way. Indeed, being data-driven has joined the ranks of “innovative”, “diverse”, and “socially responsible” as the one of most laudable features of organizational culture, at least if we go by company websites.
3 Ways to Build a Data-Driven Team
As organization turbocharge their ability to gather more and more data, what matters most is having people who can ask the right questions of the data. Although people will differ in their general predisposition towards critical thinking, you can help them develop whatever potential they have if you put in place the right incentives, give people accurate feedback, and establish an informal and non-hierarchical learning culture where people can share views and ideas. For instance, at AirBnB, employees post problems into an internal knowledge repository that allows other people to provide answers or solutions. There are also psychological qualities determining whether individuals will learn to think more empirically and quantitatively. No matter how smart your learning intervention might be, and how well-designed and executed your training program is, it will be more effective if the recipients are generally bright, curious, and hard-working – in fact, the profile of your team will be the biggest determinant of the success of your intervention.