How can you use data to create urgency for culture change?

Visualisation is the first step towards finding solutions. People are usually aware there are many smaller problems but mainly see the symptoms. If you manage to visualise problems and discover underlying problems and their impact, it is easier for stakeholders to understand what needs to be done and to prioritise it against other business priorities.

Today, many large (especially financial) institutions are still stuck in report mode. Someone creates a report and emails it daily, never knowing if anyone really even opens it! In my role, I'm trying to change the culture by moving from reporting to analytics. By showcasing the interactivity of a Tableau dashboard or the power of automation through Alteryx, leaders are wowed at how much faster and more reliable data *about their processes* are. In two recent examples, we took reporting processes that took (1) > 1 week and (2) ~1 month to compile and replaced them with daily, automated processes. The business leaders have transformed how their teams work, reducing ~1,000 man-hours/year.

The annual employee survey is still an effective tool, if teams ask the right questions and spend the time aggregating and compiling insights from it. In a generative AI world, I suspect that these surveys will become more powerful because the summarization and analysis of them at large can be done and delivered dispassionately to senior executives. Another way to collect meaningful, actionable culture-data in near-real-time is through Agile ceremonies. Using tools like Fist-of-Five during daily stand-ups or Start-Stop-Continue during Inspect and Adapt meetings can help add more tangible examples of how to engage your teams without an expensive, annual event.

Finding the right way to visualise data is crucial for analysis. Sometimes it works to visualise it along layers in the organisation, other times a process throughout a value stream. Other times it makes more sense to structure it by specific company values. Always keep in mind what your outcome is.

Try to align the data with the needs of stakeholders. If stakeholders have a pain or a need, and a result from your data could be aligned with that, it raises the urgency and willingness to do something about it.

Using data for culture change can sound daunting or hard to achieve, but it can be as simple as having a "Start-Stop-Continue" board posted physically (or virtually) in a team space where daily stand-up meetings occur. You can print a large version of a team agreement out and make sure people refer to it whenever there's a conflict or folks are unsure of how to tackle a problem. When I was an intern at GE, a leader presented everyone with the 'mindset' of the team printed and framed. 22 years, many teams, and a company later, I still have that framed mindset in my office and I use it as my personal guiding star.

Fostering a data-driven culture requires commitment from all levels to change and adapt. For example, it's easy to say that we want to use a daily dashboard to help identify areas where staffing or attention is required, but if the leader of the group still wants to download the data and manipulate it or see it in PowerPoint, the rest of the team will discard the dashboard and simply wait for the leader to do her own analysis. Teams need to commit to changing how they'll work and when the going gets tough, give feedback to teammates to improve or change new tools and processes instead of falling back to old ways. This is the same for any system, tool, process change. Commitment is the key!

Religious Community & Social Community. Data Analysis... The world is divided into 4 ruling directives ( Democratic, Kingdom, Religion & Communist). Any Cultural change or upliftment need to be segmented as per Ruling Directives for 2 different Community (Religious & Social). A major problem in gathering data is a dual faced person, who tries to get the best of the government (Free or Subsidy) which skews the analysis as a collective. So Culture Change needs to have common defined objectives, rather subjective.