A wrinkle in implementing analytics is that the majority of decision experts and proponents come from a technical, structured thinking background and often give short shrift to issues of leadership and organizational culture, or, at best, wave them away as a problem of upper management. In turn, upper management can often easily assume an ‘if we build it, they will come’ mentality: throwing money at the experts to spend on software licenses and a few headcount (if they are lucky many times I see the purchase of software and NO extra staff to run it). Such a disconnected scenario happens again and again: the results are a moribund, wishful thinking approach to analytical organizational decision making.
It is not enough to say we are going to hire a CDO (Chief Decision Officer) to push from the top-down, increase incentives, and hold a few ‘decision making process’ pep-rallies / all-day staff ‘process’ seminars. Change Management itself is a structured process, as per the work and writings of J. Kotter (‘The Heart of Change’
http://tinyurl.com/c8t38us
Indeed, there are increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques from the world of organizational research and social science which can serve to structure the process of ‘changing’ organizational culture. For example, Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Game Theory are methods which can help bridge the ‘understanding gap’ between, on the one hand, pure leadership, and on the other, hard decision process outlooks.
May 22, 2012
Management