How to Make Better Decisions With Data, with Sebastian Wernicke

Dave Stachowiak (0:00)

We all have more access to data than ever. That means we should also be making better decisions than we ever have before, right? If only it were that simple. In this episode, we explore how you can actually use all that data to make better decisions.

This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 801

SPEAKER_2 (0:20)

Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak (0:29)

Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders are born, they're made. This weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. I think one of the assumptions that we all have as leaders is that if we have more data, better data, we're going to make better decisions. That is sometimes true, but unfortunately, it is not that simple. Oh, I wish that it was. But today, a perspective on how we can actually do way better at being able to leverage data for the lasting transformation that so many of us want in our organizations and teams. I'm so pleased to welcome to the show today, Sebastian Wernicke. Sebastian, for 20 years, has guided organizations around the world to harness the power of data and AI to achieve breakthrough transformation.

His three acclaimed TED Talks have reached over 5 million viewers, and he's the author of Data-Inspired, Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation. Sebastian, welcome to the show.

Sebastian Wernicke (1:37)

Hey, Dave. Great to be here.

Dave Stachowiak (1:39)

I am so looking forward to this conversation because of the perspective that you bring, and also the challenge that you bring to so many of us as leaders in how we think about data, and it comes right down to the first line of the book, the first line of the introduction, which you write, most data initiatives don't fail. They do something worse. They succeed at making your organization very good at staying the same.

Tell me more about that. What is it that we miss?

Sebastian Wernicke (2:15)

Yeah. I mean, if you just think about the last data initiative that your organization has done. So, I mean, everybody in the audience will know the last project that built a dashboard or implemented a kind of forecasting algorithm maybe.

And then you think about what came out of it. Usually, it didn't outright fail, right? You got the data, you got the dashboard in the end. And so the question then becomes, what is the ultimate effect of that? And if you look back in two or three years and you look at that dashboard or you look at the project, there's a very high chance that you may say, hmm, I produced something that's useful and that is creating some value for me. But actually, I was hoping for a bit more change. I was hoping for some sort of breakthrough transformation, right? We wanted to change our business model. We want to change how the company is running with all of these new exciting capabilities that we get out of data.

But that isn't quite happening. And when it comes to questions such as, are we building scalable data capabilities? Are we achieving meaningful value? Are we ready to transform the business? Then oftentimes, the answer is no. So you have all of this data around, you have all of these projects and pilots that are producing the results you're asking. But somehow it feels like you're not making that big change that everybody was promising. And of course, also not getting that disruptive amount of value out of the data that you have around.

Dave Stachowiak (3:51)

And that leads to the assumption that I mentioned in the introduction, that if we have better data, we'll make better decisions. And I think a lot of us assume that. And you say that that's a misconception.

What is the misconception part of it?

Sebastian Wernicke (4:10)

Yeah, I like to refer to that as the data deficit theory. So, the assumption that all we lack is data. And as long as we get data to the right person at the right time, that magic will happen and our decisions will improve. And I think that's sort of the intuitive assumption and the hope that we have with data. That in a world that is ever more complex, ever more fast, that all we need is data, then we will know what's going on, and it will point us the way and we can avoid all of these complex and difficult decisions that we have to make as leaders.

Now, there's a couple of issues with that assumption. One is that data can even do that, that data is capable of giving us a full picture, of pointing us in the direction.