Page 147 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

136 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Ultimately, you’ll have to make a decision and trust your now well-
informed intuition that it’s the right one, or at least mostly right. You’ll
also have to back it up and be courageous in defending it, whether to
more-senior leaders, customers, partners, or the board. As you do this,
remember that making this kind of decision is probably better than try-
ing to do more analysis and more data collection, which only kicks the
can further down the road and delays getting anything done. And also
remember that the more you learn how to make decisions without all the
data, the better you’ll become at doing it.

Part of this decision depends on your own inclinations. Some leaders
want to base their decisions on as much hard data as possible. Others want
just enough data to either reinforce or challenge their intuition. Still oth-
ers may prefer a combination of hard, analytical data with anecdotal and
qualitative input. But you’ll also want to ask yourself and your team the
following:

• Are we focusing on the right questions? Many companies collect
the data that is available rather than the data needed to help make
decisions and run the business. So you need to be clear about what
questions you want your data to help you answer and then focus
the data collection around that rather than everything else that is
possible. Consider the key leverage points in the business or in your
unit—the ones that will make the most difference between success
and failure—and what data you need to track progress on these.
Also think about changes that you are trying to foster and what
data will tell you whether you’re on track or not.

• Does our data tell a story? Most data comes in fragments. To be
useful, these individual bits of information need to be put together
into a coherent explanation of the business situation, which means
integrating data into a “story.” While enterprise data systems have