Data is behind all of your actions. You realize it or not. Most of our day to day actions happen in an autopilot mode as our brain establishes freeways on most frequently taken action pathways to results. For example, sitting, brushing, saying “Hello” to anyone you bump into all happen so commonly that without our deeper attention they just happen.

A group of these pathways and routines are baked into models. A model is a template or a good approximation of how things work in the real world. For example, a typical work day morning can be modeled as, One gets up, starts the coffee machine, brushes, prepares breakfast and you can fill in the rest…

A model gives your brain an easy map of how to navigate and maneuver the world. You encounter a strange situation, your brain searches takes a ‘seemingly alike’ model(s) and starts amending them to have a variation in your maps, just in case you come across the situation again.

I would like to focus this story around how a group of people (call them organizations) act and the models the group uses. Take for example, Managers. Have you ever wondered how do Managers act? Part it is based on the models they build for themselves. Not all managers respond in exactly the same way. You see their maps are different depending on their prior experience, their latent personality and their perspective of the situation. Throw a new problem at the manager, their models get quickly adjusted accordingly.

Today’s organizations need to be fairly dynamic. They made need to scale up or scale down actions at a short notice, change their responses totally or embrace new ways of acting. For example, a new competitor may surprise you by introducing a similar product a month before the launch of yours. What is your response? The managers may not have a model for that, but they figure a response quickly and may amend their models for this eventuality in the future.
Most day to day problems that a manager encounters, they build these established model maps. They pass on pieces of these maps to their teams. What to do when your shipment is delayed, how to respond to your delayed receivables.

So, here is the challenge: Is there a framework to help us streamline our actions so that we act as a group in a predictable and effective way? If we don’t have a framework, it is fairly easy to build one for ourselves. The following four steps hold promise: Understand, Analyze, Asset-ize and Leverage

Understand: The first step is to understand the decision making model. Start with the most common types of problems you encounter and the way you arrive at possible solutions, think of it as a recipe to solve those problems.

Analyze: Second analyze the external tools you use to solve the problems. Focus on the data related tools. It could be some reports, google, daily news or even word of mouth from your peers. At what stage you use these tools and how much of weightage you give to the data and how important they are. Will these data be useful to others and if yes, how do they get it currently.

Asset-ize: If anything data is used repeatedly, it qualifies to be elevated to an asset. The more assets you have per action pathway, the easier it will be to control scaling up, scaling down of activities and adapting to change. Overall communication overhead will go down.

Leverage: Finally, you follow a methodical approach to leverage the assets. The next part of this series builds on this.