Until now, purpose has often been seen as an add-on, something that simply serves to boost employee morale and commitment. But what organisations such as the B Corporation network demonstrate, is that baking purpose into the very core of your business and strategy is what drives all of growth, profit, change, commitment and sustainability. It also gives your organisation a more clearly defined set of values, which is becoming increasingly pivotal in decision-making, especially against a tide of growing amounts of (mis)information and data.
At x+why, our mission is to ‘unite, inspire and amplify’, by bringing together a diverse array of creatives, spanning across a vast range of industries, who are driven to be the change they want to see in the world. Sharing the space means we foster a collaborative over competitive environment, where new ideas are developed, plans are put into action, and a real difference ripples out across borders.
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Until now, purpose has often been seen as an add-on, something that simply serves to boost employee morale and commitment. But what organisations such as the B Corporation network demonstrate, is that baking purpose into the very core of your business and strategy is what drives all of growth, profit, change, commitment and sustainability. It also gives your organisation a more clearly defined set of values, which is becoming increasingly pivotal in decision-making, especially against a tide of growing amounts of (mis)information and data.
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Drowning In Data-driven Decisions
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Data is becoming the latest must-have asset, quite literally being worth its weight in gold. Generally seen as a tool for bypassing irrational human incompetence by making intelligent, informed and statistically-backed decisions, it’s quickly being perceived as a panacea for a wide range of strategic solutions. But how accurate is it really?
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One of the first misconceptions to note about data, is that it does not remove human judgement, intuition or emotion at all - it simply adds another layer to it. For example, a website editor may gather insights about his content using metrics such as page views, advertising revenue and audience engagement, to ascertain where his time and energy is best spent in increasing ROI.
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Perhaps the page views suggests that he should focus on either promoting the most viewed (most popular) page, or improving the status of the least viewed page, in order to boost his scores. However adding an extra dimension to this and compiling the results from the data on advertising spend might change these decisions, as the page results may be entirely different from a profitability point of view. Further still, insight into audience engagement via feedback buttons may again produce results that contradict the original train of thought - more profitable articles might have the least enthused response, and more niche articles that had neither much in the way of revenue or exposure are connecting with their audiences best.
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This highlights how leveraging data is ultimately still a subjective judgement call that relies on weighing up opportunities and trade-offs. Knowing only that your decisions must be data-driven is not enough to understand which decisions might suit you or your organisation best, it also requires being values-led.
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Establishing What Matters
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In the endless data minefield establishing what matters comes back to core values (what is the most ethical decision? Which provides the most value, and to whom?) and the main priorities of the organisation - to make profit, to boost visibility, or to generate authentic and loyal engagement, with key focuses that may shift over the life cycle of the company. Values help to establish what data can be ignored, which data should drive decisions, and which metrics should just be available in wider data-consciousness.
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Beyond informing decisions, data also provides insights into the character of a company and its interaction with the wider ecosystem, which may inform future if not present strategy. The main fault with the term ‘data-driven’ is that it treats data as an apolitical entity that informs value judgements, as opposed to being subjected to them. Further to this, how the data is collected, what data gets collected, which data is valued most, and how the data is manipulated or presented are highly complex and often morally ambiguous questions that don’t have a straight forward answer, but do have long-lasting implications.
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Understanding that being data-conscious is not the same as data-driven, is key to more accurately observing the ways in which different stakeholders will manipulate data to further their own, often pre-existing agendas. Becoming aware of our own bias’ fosters the recognition that actions are more readily changed than values, for example political beliefs tend to be fairly consistent between groups even when presented with opposing data. Values are our pre-existing frameworks for sorting, compiling and referencing. An in-built heuristic for making decisions quickly and efficiently - data is not the value in and of itself.
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Not What, But How
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This brings us back to some of the core values and principles leveraged at x+why, that it’s not just what we’re using or focusing on but how - profit, but not at the expense of people and planet, as per the triple bottom line. Data is no different, and we need to shift from a data-driven mindset focused on amassing data, towards a value-driven mindset that exploits the data as one of many potential sources of information and insight into improving customer, product and operational value.
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This hones in on an important aspect of learning and development from the perspective of leveraging the increasingly blurred boundaries between human-machine interfaces - that economies of learning and insight can prove more valuable than economies of scale. Management and monetisation are completely different sides of the coin, and in knowledge based industries, AI innovations like active learning and transfer learning will be critically important in accelerating an organisation’s learning capabilities - by marrying the best of perceptual human capabilities with the accuracy and speed of AI.
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A comprehensive approach to gaining competitive advantage in the knowledge economy (and today, every business is part of the knowledge economy) lies in defining the real question, having access to a strong set of data, and having a robust set of values that act as a refining lens to generate valuable and practical insight. Given the subjective nature of interpretation, each element of this process benefits from interdisciplinary collaboration. A business problem is best answered in a holistic way when looked at across departments, silos and stakeholders - because each set will have their own dimensions of understanding and experience, generating a variety of questions and answers that work towards building a systemic picture.
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Team Work Makes The Dream Work
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This highlights that in an increasingly specialised world, no man is an island, and it would be impossible for any one team to generate all possible sets of questions and solutions, no matter how broad the data set. The full value of a solution requires that the problem is understood at many different depths, and this requires alignment all along the value chain. There is no one-size-fits all approach to work and business, and the core components of the mindset shift into a values-driven approach require:
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- Accepting that there is no one single solution and instead opting for many tweaks, pivots and experiments based on live feedback.
- Clearly defining the problem to better establish what the exact requirements are, which will help to refine insights from such a diverse array of departmental perspectives including IT, finance, operations and sales.
- Re-innovating and re-designing as and when appropriate in order to achieve full value and potential
- Forgoing the need to aim for a perfect solution and looking at which areas would benefit most from incremental value, even a difference of 2-4% can often produce substantial change. Incremental steps of growth and acceptance can be just as disruptive as sudden changes. Google began with small continuous improvements in searching.
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Fully realising the value of something starts with acknowledging the interplay between balancing polarities and approaches. A subjective value-driven mind-set is key for the success of an objective data-driven strategy and implementation, and involves understanding that leveraging potential isn’t always about looking for ‘the next big thing’, but consistently realising the many small potentials along the way.
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At x+why, our values include: being a life-long learner with curiosity, open mindedness, and investing in on-going knowledge; being led by both head and heart, as well as being authentic and brave. Everybody in our flexible workspaces is a valued member of the extended family and team. We prize views and opinions from all walks of life and pride ourselves on our inclusion and diversity. Together with the global B Corporation community, we believe in putting people and planet before profit and that business should be a force for good.
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