Humans naturally seek to avoid pain and discomfort. Discomfort is a sign that something is not correct in our world. Most of us are highly attuned to our environments and even the slightest changes can set off our “spider senses.”
I have worked with a large number of clients and one thing is always true when we start putting in dashboards – they immediately become uncomfortable. Not because they’ve done anything wrong but because they are now seeing something that has previously been hidden. Anything could be hiding in those little tables and charts.
Did I forget to input that project?
How should I explain that contractors aren’t included in the headcount?
What should we do where costs are not apples-to-apples across locations?
Why isn’t the building on Main Street showing up?
These types of questions or issues are raised 100% of the time. It doesn’t matter how good (or bad) the client has historically been with managing their data. 100% of the time.
Here’s the secret though – these questions have nothing to do with dashboards or visibility of information. They have been asked over and over in team meetings and review sessions. They are footnoted on presentation after presentation. Months of person-time has been spent getting snapshots of the data put into PowerPoint presentations. Dashboards simply lend a greater sense of urgency to resolving the issues.
We often deal with the same problems so often that the early days of change are no longer novel to us. We gloss over the problems that to us are simple and easily resolved. Having a conversation about how to calculate cost per square foot is easy to us. But within many organizations this could take months by itself. Throwing out a dashboard to soon can be politically sensitive.
Discomfort is not bad though. Forcing conversations to happen is often necessary – and it often speeds up the resolutions.