How often have you found yourself examining a common practice in your organization, shaking your head and wondering, “Who Set Up This Crazy Procedure?”
H ow do our Common Practices become so much different from Best Practices?
I’m always fascinated by the breadth and depth of professional sports analytics these days. You only have to watch a few TV sports events to see some of the remarkable statistics and tracking data that’s collected and graphically displayed in real time.
What they teach you … and what directly applies to your own organization … is that by thoughtfully considering currently available data, you may discover that what you’re doing every day no longer represents Best Practices.
How Do We Shake Things Up?
Sports data provides some powerful examples of this phenomenon. It is more visually compelling and demonstrates how easily we can become complacent, completely ignoring the data.
When you consider, How can you make sure that Common Practices are always Best Practices?, you’ll see how certain common decisions made by football coaches, for example, are inconsistent with the data. Likewise, current penalty kick strategies in soccer.
Get Off the Easy Road and Examine the Data
Collecting and analyzing data in the world of professional sports has surpassed what many of us find in our organizations … but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Make time to take a thorough look at your Common Practices and make sure you’re actually following Best Practices supported by the latest data.
Go get ’em, Coach. Make the right call.