Business Change Management

More importantly, can you understand what it's saying? 

These days, more and more (and more) data keeps coming at us, and if you're like me, you're wondering what to do with all. Can it help you run your business better? Can it reveal important facts about your customers? Can it identify nonusers of your products or services and show you how to convert them into users?

For those in management and strategic planning in healthcare systems, can data help guide CEOs' decisions? Can it help hospitals respond more quickly to market and cultural shifts taking place all around them? These are all important questions.

To have meaning, data has to be visualized

As I write in my recent article in Healthcare Marketing Report, perhaps the true value of data lies not in the data itself but in how people visualize it. The challenge is our own brains, which tend to sort through incoming data and only capture those data points that affirm what we already know or believe to be true. The rest we simply discount or ignore.

I assert that to really understand the meaning of data, we need to take it and turn it into a story that helps people act upon it and share it, thereby influencing and leading others. (You can read my entire HMR article by clicking here.)

How to hear what your data is saying and turn it into the right story

Data as storytelling has the power to bring about great change, most critically in the healthcare field. But in order to understand facts, the brain needs to visualize them. Therefore the ability to convert cold, hard numbers into a compelling story that can, for instance, improve the patient experience or reduce operating costs, has enormous value, as I write in my latest article for Hospital Impact.

As I point out, because the brain is a pattern-making machine it is not happy unless it can convert data in a visual way into a meaningful story that resonates with what it knows already. This “data visualization” is something we’re working on with several of our clients at Simon Associates Management Consultants, and it’s proving to be quite a challenge.

So that you, too, can learn how to make your data come alive, enabling you to “see, feel and think” about it differently—which is when real, lasting change can occur—I share some approaches that have worked for these clients.