Q. How do you turn data into a plan?
It’s just a lot of opinions about a lot of things. And so what you do with qualitative data is just a very typical standard research methodology. You just comb through all of that qualitative data and you look for the themes. What are people saying to us in a thematic way? You’re really looking for anywhere from three to eight, nine themes.
Once you begin to discover those themes, then you begin to convert them into high-level strategies. How then do we set goals to achieve that strategic direction? It’s a very iterative process, very back-and-forth, very time-consuming.
The people at the top who are generally responsible for facilitating this don’t have all the answers — as a matter of fact, they have very few answers. But when you give the people who are actually doing these things a sense of direction and you say, ‘If we’re here now, this strategy has emerged, how do we get from point A to point B?’ you generally get a lot of good information.
Q. How do you keep everyone headed in the same direction?
It’s like an upside-down funnel. You’re constantly communicating where you are in the process, where you’re heading and what you want the outcome of the next step to be. As long as you use that funnel analogy and you feel like you are taking what is a very broad set of data and slowly moving it forward in that funnel to strategies and goals, as long as you can see progress along that path, then you know you’re OK.
But if you keep having all these zinger outliers spinning off and you’re not sure what to do with them, you’ve got to find a way to pull them into the funnel. We had to actually stop our process for four months because we had a huge organizational structural issue that needed to be addressed. If you hit one of those huge obstacles and you realize you can’t go around or through, then you’ve got to deal with it.
When you start the process, you let them know that these are the steps of the process and there has to be more and more focus each step. And then you tell them, ‘It’s my job to facilitate this, and it’s my job to create that focus. Every step of the way, I will share with you where I think this is going, what all this information is telling us.’ And so every step of the way, you have to communicate.
Be as transparent as you can be. Make all the data available, on your intranet or whatever. You say, ‘We have combed through this data and we have come up with these eight themes. Now we want you to comb through the data and see if there is anything we have missed.’ Then you get back and you confirm those themes.
Then you say, ‘The next step is to take these eight themes and narrow them down to five strategies. Here are the five strategies that we have come up with. Now what do you think?’
Then once you get the strategies, you say, ‘Now we want everybody to begin to develop goals in their areas that help to achieve each of these five strategies.’
If you take a step and it’s not transparent, then they’ve lost trust.
Just remember that visual of the funnel. You’re focusing every step, getting tighter, clearer, smaller.
How to reach: Point Park University, (412) 391-4100 or www.pointpark.edu
