Report Card

If you want to improve at something, you need more than practice. You need data.

You can shoot a thousand free throws and you will definitely get better at free throws. But if every hundred attempts you review footage, map your missed shots, compare successful throws to technique and stance, and all that other stuff – you’ll get much better.

The challenge, of course, is that collecting data isn’t free or effortless. It’s easier to just make free throws. At the same time though, for most people (and organizations), collecting data should be much easier than they make it!

What often happens is that the data collection process doesn’t get improved because the bad, inefficient process hurts the wrong people. If you touch a stove and your hand gets burnt, you’ll quickly learn not to touch the stove. But if you touch the stove and by some magic someone else’s hand gets burnt, then you’re never going to learn your lesson and your poor cursed friend is going to be in a lot of pain.

Consider an all-too-common example: In sales, most sales reps have to not only perform sales activities, they also have to report on those activities. They have to log calls or in-person visits, track results, maybe even fill out daily or weekly reports, etc. The value of that data is very high, of course. It enables sales managers and trainers to target inefficiencies in the sales techniques, it enables reps to learn and improve, etc.

The problem is that in many cases, the way this data gets collected is by onerous data entry tasks on the part of the reps, often to the point where it takes more time than the actual sales activity itself! Think about the revenue lost by asking your sales team to only sell half the time. Is the improvement from the data making up that gap? Probably not!

(Imagine that a baseball player is in spring training, practicing swings. After every single swing, the player himself is required to walk over to the camera that just filmed him, watch the tape, and fill out a report on things like angle of swing, stance, etc. Sure, reviewing your footage is good! But that’s such a horribly inefficient process that the player is barely getting any practice at all.)

So why doesn’t that sales data collection process improve? Because it’s not the managers who have to collect it – it’s the reps. The wrong people get hurt by it. In general, bad organizational processes often work this way: They’re implemented by people who aren’t the direct users, and so the process stays bad.

Not only is a slow and inefficient process for collecting data a resource loss, it also often degrades the quality of the data! Because guess what, people cheat. There’s this story from WWII where soldiers tasked with counting the dead from every battle were just making up random numbers instead of risking their lives by going back to the battlefield and possibly becoming one of them. (They were found out, incidentally, because none of their reported daily counts ended in 5 or 0; the soldiers were trying to pick random-sounding numbers to increase the credibility of their fake reports, so they never picked “round” numbers that they felt sounded like estimates. But statistically, 20% of the results should have ended with 5 or 0, and none of them did.)

If soldiers will lie about how many dead bodies there are on a battlefield, your sales reps will definitely just hastily scrawl in numbers to quicken an onerous report.

Do everything you can to make the process more efficient. Use automated tools. Hire separate enablement folks to just focus on the reporting side of whatever you’re doing. Reduce the data you collect to its absolute most minimal form that’s still useful. Whatever it takes, just remember that you can’t make the reporting harder than the task, or the task won’t get done.