The Data Fluent Culture - Data Fluency: Empowering Your Organization with Effective Data Communication - page 131

turned the tables by asking the board members to stand. He arranged them
in a line and asked them to imagine they were ordering at a fast food res-
taurant. Then he brought the data to life by demonstrating the cost of wait
times in line, the profitability of each individual fast food customer, and the
impact of a poor product experience. When a customer left the line because
of slow service, it might cost the company only a dollar in profit, but it wasn't
hard for people in the room to extrapolate a single data point by the many
thousands of fast food locations. The Board quickly came to understand the
data behind the vague concept of customer service in a way it never would
have through rote presentation of data in slides.
ARTICuLATE SPECIFIC, MEASuREABLE INDICATORS
The language of data has nuanced dialects that vary from organization to
organization and industry to industry. The dialect reflects the organization's
geography, industry, history, and circumstances. This organization-specific
data language results in unique meanings associated with data fields and
metrics. A concept as simple as customer satisfaction can have a wide-ranging
meaning. The definition is directly linked to the organization's approach to
collecting the data, expectations of what satisfied means, required time period
for data gathering, and sample size. A data fluent culture ensures everyone in
the organization has a common understanding of exactly what is meant by a
term like customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, the benefits of data diminish when people spend more time
debating terminology, specifics of calculations, and validity of sources rather
than discussing what action to take based on the results. This is not to suggest
that validity and reliability and precise calculations are not important topics.
Yet, when these definitional questions linger in an organization, productive
discussions are derailed in meeting after meeting.
Amazon.com is well known for creating small teams that set out to solve spe-
cific business problems. Aside from the cross-functional, cross-divisional nature
of these teams, the most innovative aspect of this model has been the use
of a single fitness function to measure team performance. For Amazon.com,
a fitness function is a performance metric that directly reflects the goals of
the team and is approved by senior leadership. The choice of the fitness func-
tion—and how it is calculated—is critically important because it represents the
driving objective for the team. It creates team alignment and accountability
on a clear goal.