As organization turbocharge their ability to gather more and more data, what matters most is having people who can ask the right questions of the data. Although people will differ in their general predisposition towards critical thinking, you can help them develop whatever potential they have if you put in place the right incentives, give people accurate feedback, and establish an informal and non-hierarchical learning culture where people can share views and ideas. For instance, at AirBnB, employees post problems into an internal knowledge repository that allows other people to provide answers or solutions. There are also psychological qualities determining whether individuals will learn to think more empirically and quantitatively. No matter how smart your learning intervention might be, and how well-designed and executed your training program is, it will be more effective if the recipients are generally bright, curious, and hard-working – in fact, the profile of your team will be the biggest determinant of the success of your intervention.
It is no doubt a sign of progress that a significant proportion of organizations and managers today appear to feel guilty when they admit that they are making big management decisions in an intuitive rather than evidence-based way. Indeed, being data-driven has joined the ranks of “innovative”, “diverse”, and “socially responsible” as the one of most laudable features of organizational culture, at least if we go by company websites.
Although feeling the pressure to demonstrate that objective facts — instead of subjective preferences — underlie managers’ key choices is no doubt a major step towards actually becoming a data-driven organization, it’s an ambitious goal for any company, requiring a big cultural transformation, which will need to transcend the wishes of senior leaders to create real changes in how people think, feel, and act at all levels of the organization. And, as with any cultural transformation, managers are a critical agent of change. Here are three key talent management recommendations that should help your team to become more data-driven:
1. Foster critical thinking: While much of the current discussions around data focus on the role of technology and AI, it is really the human side of the equation that will remain the biggest differentiator for teams and organizations. As organization turbocharge their ability to gather more and more data — and it’s not so much about size, but rather about quality — what matters most is having people who can ask the right questions to the data. In fact, as Ajay Agrawal and colleagues argue in their recent book, artificial intelligence (AI) will allow for cheaper prediction, which explains why there’s so much demand for it. But human curiosity and critical thinking are needed to identify the main problems that AI and data can help to solve, and this process starts with you.
This means questioning your own biases, distrusting your intuition, and displaying a healthy degree of skepticism when presented with ideas and suggestions from others, in particular your team. Equally important, don’t reward others for coming up with intuitive ideas or ideas that feel intuitively right. Instead, celebrate critical thinking, curiosity, and the deeper desire to question things.For example, Amazon encourages disagreements to avoid groupthink and leverage the benefits of cognitive diversity.
Although people will differ in their general predisposition towards critical thinking, you can help them develop whatever potential they have if you put in place the right incentives, give people accurate feedback, and establish an informal and non-hierarchical learning culture where people can share views and ideas.
