Without Data there is no Business Design
Every decision we make is based on the insights, experience and expertise available to us (1), how available, accessible and usable this information is.
It is therefore impossible to think of decisions ranging from strategy, to transformations or ways-of-working without thinking about the quality of the data helping inform and guide those decisions.
Business Designers therefore need not only to be able to coordinate and orchestrate the best decision making process, but also architect and build the systems of insights and data informing the organization’s decision making and measurements.
We need to know who makes which decisions and understand how the right insights can be designed with the right incentives at the right time (the right insights at the wrong time or with the wrong incentives will come across as a risk to someone’s ‘control’ and so understanding how decisions are made is material to any data or insights offer (2)).
Sources and recommended further reading:
(1). Helge Tennø, Keep your products close, but your customers closer, https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/keep-your-products-close-but-your-customers-closer-c991c600ef59
(2). Erika Hall, Boundaryless podcast — Decisions, Not Data: Why Research needs Organizational Readiness with Erika Hall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yi7Enc-I9w
(3). Stefan Thomke, Experimentation works, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=57045
(4). Matt LeMay, Agile for everybody, https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/agile-for-everybody/9781492033509/
(5). Tricia Wang, Why Big Data needs Thick Data, https://medium.com/ethnography-matters/why-big-data-needs-thick-data-b4b3e75e3d7
(6). Dave Snowden, Big, Thick and Rich (the data), https://thecynefin.co/big-thick-and-rich/?srsltid=AfmBOorDlOPNzLMqcei_osg4l2HZjQ6wehpeT-uan5MmpCnHVf_WptFZ
