An inevitable consequence of opening up access to insight for all will be the generation of many more ideas. With greater understanding of the facts and strong evidence will come a greater resolve to take action that drives change. For some, this could be seen as a managerial nightmare, an opening of a Pandora's box of feisty bee-in-the-bonnet employees looking to do something different.
But this wasn't the case for Peter King when he was running British Cycling. For him, a broad funnel of ideas was the starting point for finding that extra 1% which could be the difference in winning another gold medal. "We've tried all sorts of random and bizarre ideas because we are not sure what's going to happen until you've analysed it properly. It's a continuous process, we probably shelve as many ideas as we actually use, and sometimes you have no guarantee that what you are doing is making a difference."
This tells us something about the management style that is required to foster this success: trusting, supportive, and open to ideas from others. Evidence has a way of making this trust easier to give (where the facts are indisputable), but the leap of faith that some organisations might be required to take should not be underestimated. And it is a leap of faith that will no doubt have its detractors.
Peter King: "Our secret squirrel department, the team that now sits under the Director of Marginal Gains, had the job of coming up with lots of potential ways to improve and testing them. I think at the start of this approach, a huge number of people thought we didn't know what we were doing and the old ways would eventually prove to be the best way. We stuck with it, we evolved a plan for Sydney 2000 and because we started to see success, people started to accept the approach."
Peter King also points to the culture of constantly striving for success that underpinned this empowerment and desire to investigate lots of seemingly bizarre ideas. In many ways, he is saying that a business can't afford not to investigate a broad funnel of ideas: "What happens in business is people do not spend enough time asking why they do things a certain way. However successful we might be, we never stopped looking for the next opportunity to improve. The reason we could repeat our 2008 Bejing Olympic success in London 2012 was because we didn't stand still. We knew people would catch up with us so we had to move on. We had to analyse everything we did in Beijing and work out how it could be improved".
David
Blackwell
David is a Partner in Deloitte's Enterprise Risk Services
practice specialising in data analytics, data management and cyber
security. David has worked with many of the UK and
Europe's leading Telecoms organisations, and has deep expertise
in helping them secure, manage and derive insight from their
data.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.