Episode Details
Back to EpisodesData literacy: measure decision quality, not training
Description
Why do data literacy programs teach medians, filters and chart types and still leave the business running on gut feeling? The position here is blunt: knowledge and behavior are different things, and almost nobody measures the second one. The fix is to build training around real recurring decisions like pricing, hiring and inventory, and to require anyone proposing a decision to state in advance what evidence would change their mind.
You come away with a way to score decision quality across ten recurring decisions before and after a program, a read on Booking.com's experimentation default, and evidence from MIT Sloan Management Review, O'Reilly Radar and DBT Labs on why culture and trust, not skills, are the bottleneck.
Key takeaways
- Pick ten recurring decisions, record whether each was made on gut, politics or evidence, then measure again six months later.
- Require the person proposing a decision to write down what evidence would change their mind before the meeting.
- Start the literacy program with the twelve executives who actually make the calls, not with five thousand employees.
- Tie learning to the actual workflow, like a plant manager changing one reorder decision on a forecast, rather than a training calendar.
- Treat vendor data such as DBT Labs' claims with care and cross-check against independent work like O'Reilly's annual surveys.
Chapters
0:00 Why most data literacy programs fail
1:01 Designing training around real decisions
1:50 Booking.com experimentation and workflow learning
2:22 Measuring decision quality over six months
3:15 Executive committee is the real bottleneck
4:06 Monday morning test for any decision
Go deeper, free lessons
- Building a data literacy program
- Data literacy: building analytical capability across the organization
- Calculating the ROI of data initiatives
- Communicating with the board and c-suite
- Driving cultural change to data-driven
The article: https://www.mba-training.com/en/blog/data-literacy-behavior-change-roi
MBA Training, mba-training.com