#20 The Story In Your Performance Data

Your performance data is trying to tell you something. Something deeper and richer and more insightful than just whether or not you're on track to hit your target. Can you hear it? Probably not, unless you're already doing these six practices to hear your data's story.

PRACTICE #1: Use two or three related measures, not just one measure to understand a specific result. Staff Turnover is not a sufficient indicator of staff engagement, but combine it with measures like the percentage of staff intending to leave within the next 6 months and staff satisfaction with their worklife, you get a less biased picture.

PRACTICE #2: Don't tick & flick - consider all your measures as important characters in the same performance story. Don't you think that optimising on-time running and safety performance is much wiser than trying to maximise each of these, independent of the other?

PRACTICE #3: Consider qualitative indicators as well as quantitative measures to add more life to the story of performance. Just like a series of video case studies or photos of smashed up cars give sensory context to improvements over time indicated by road crash severity metrics.

PRACTICE #4: Look at your data in more ways than one - the average is only one small part of the plot. A fuller understanding of customer satisfaction comes from examining the variation in satisfaction ratings, the change in satisfaction levels over time, the correlation between satisfaction levels and revenue - not just the average satisfaction rating.

PRACTICE #5: Report causal analysis and hypotheses along with the performance results, to give the story somewhere to go. If cycle time is blowing out, then find out the events that likely triggered the shifts in cycle time, or find out on which activities most of the cycle time is being spent.

PRACTICE #6: Ask your data questions to draw out more of the story. Why aren't costs staying within budget? Which parts of the budget are blowing out most? Where is budget being managed well? What if we cut back spending on this?

When you think about putting your performance measures to use to improve performance, think systemically: do what you can to draw out the story in the performance data. Stories engage people, and when it comes to numbers and statistics and measures, we usually have to do all we can to get people engaged!

TAKING ACTION:
Think of one performance measure for which you have plenty of historical data. Collate that data, and start looking at it using different tools, to uncover its story. Try a time series graph to see if it's changed over time, a histogram to see its variability, a scatter plot to see how strongly it is associated with other measures.

#19 Don't Waste Time With Trivial Measures

You hear it a lot, don't you? That you should only measure what you can control. Hogwash! The most powerful measures are those that track what you can only influence.

Let's take a closer look at how to measure to expand your influence - and get much more meaningful results.

Stephen Covey Started It...

In his landmark book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about our circle of concern and circle of influence. The idea is that we shouldn't spend our time and energy worrying about things in our circle of concern. We've can't do anything about results we might want that are out there in our cirlce of concern.

But by the same token, we don't have to spend all our time focusing just on the results within our circle of control. If we do that, we measure trivial things only, like how much work we're doing.

The real power comes from what we do about the results we want in our circle of influence.

Focus On And Measure The Results In Your Circle of Influence

The kinds of results in our circle of influence include the impacts that our work has on our customers, colleagues, managers and suppliers. These results are the true purpose for turning up at work. Working hard and doing our tasks is *not* the purpose for turning up at work.

Measuring results in your circle of influence starts with examining the interface between your work and your customers and other stakeholders. And to understand what these results truly are, you're going to have to ask those customers and stakeholders. In their answers are the clues about what difference you can be making for them, and therefore what results you should be measuring.

It can also help to flowchart your work processes too, to make it more visible what exact outputs you provide to your customers and stakeholders, as a trigger to talk with them about the outcomes they experience. ('Outcomes' is just another word that means impacts or results.)

Exercise Your Influence To Improve Performance

When the performance measures of the results in your circle of influence show you where things are really at, you can focus more easily on what you can improve.

Remember that in your circle of influence, you're never aiming for 100% perfection. You're just aiming to move the results closer to where you (and your customers and stakeholders) want them to be. And you'll get better and better at this, but only if you keep at it over time.

Strategies to exercise your influence, to improve your performance results, include:

1. analysing your work processes, to find ways you can redesign or streamline how you produce those outputs for your customers and stakeholders

2. collaborating with others you work with, such as your colleagues or suppliers, to find ideas that might improve your performance results

3. raising awareness or knowledge of the desired results among others who have more influence than you do, and inviting their help

The idea is to not give up on measuring the results that matter, just because you're not sure you have enough control over the results that matter.

TAKING ACTION:
Is there an important result that you're not measuring because it's outside your circle of control? Take another look at that result, and if it's in your circle of influence, start measuring it and exploring how you can expand and exercise your influence in moving it closer to where you want it to be.