Meta-Analysis: Who Analyzes the Analysts?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Sep 18, 2009
At this year’s
Gartner NA CRM conference, Gareth Herschel presented “Making Gut Decisions More Intelligent”. One of his key points was that most organizations fail to study and improve their decision-making process. “We have to create a culture of auditing the decisions,” he said: not to punish bad decision makers, but to identify ways to make better decisions in the future.
As part of this decision audit, Gareth advocates logging for each decision which best practices were followed. For instance:
- Was the forecast of market demand accurate?
- Was there an opportunity for dissenting voices to be heard?
- Did stakeholders share information?
Then, once enough time has passed to determine whether a decision was a success or failure, plot each best practice on a quadrant.
This quadrant analysis is adapted from "Flaws in Strategic Decision Making: McKinsey Global Survey Results": For the vertical axis, use the percentage of decisions for which the best practice was followed, with 0% at the bottom and 100% at the top; for the horizontal axis, use the difference between the presence of such practices in successful decisions subtracting out their presence in unsuccessful decisions.
The most important quadrant that emerges reveals practices that are “Common in Successes, Rare in Failures”. These are the key decision-making practices that are most important to your industry and organization.
To parallel Kathy Harris’ advice of “Continually
innovate how you innovate!”, you should continually analyze how you analyze.