The main thing that skews up decision-making

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It’s not data quality.

data visualization choices

or a lack of data literacy

It’s incentives.

If you want data driven decisions, than you have to address the primary barrier to those decisions. Incentives are a crucial part of being able to make good decisions.

What are good incentives? It’s when people are rewarded for the right things and not rewarded for the wrong things

• If I’m terrified of making a mistake because people get fired for making mistakes, I’m incentivized to NOT make an intentional choice (passive or ignore decisions)

• If my compensation is heavily tied to making quota and sales this month, I’m incentivized to sign deals that help me hit my number right now, but are long term bad fits and end up leaving angry customers.

• If I have departmental budget that expires at the end of the month and I have to spend it or disappears then I’m incentivized to make a (potentially) quick decision.

Incentives can skew all parts of your decision making process. It can mess up which outcome you are striving for, it can alter how much time you spend on a decision, it can shape what information you look at, etc.

This is a dramatically under-discussed topic.

Because incentives show up everywhere in our modern company.

The company politics that everyone complains about are fundamentally about incentives.

You can’t make good decisions without good incentives.

Want to enable data-driven decision in your organization? Look beyond data quality and whether to choose a pie chart or bar chart (you should choose bar chart btw) and look at the real driving force beyond decisions.

I’m here,

Sawyer