Building a data habit

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg is a book I'd recommend everyone should read, particularly anyone looking to change the habits of business users to become more data-driven, and increase user adoption. The building of a data habit can be the biggest hurdle preventing a business from evolving and gaining a competitive advantage through deeper understanding of their data - empowering them to take informed actions.

Through data analysis, a decision-maker's influence can shift from opinion to fact. This will allow them to answer previously unknown questions, such as "Will a customer buy product A, B or C based on their previous purchases?". It will also allow decision-makers to answer those types of questions with confidence. After all, it's through data analysis that takes uncertainty, and the sole reliance on gut-feel, out of the decision making process. Interestingly though...

Nearly all business leaders acknowledge that data is important to their industry and in how their company currently makes decisions. But shockingly, just 8% of firms have made major changes in the way the data is used over the past five years. 

The data literacy index by Qlik

So, while business leaders commonly use data to monitor the performance of their business, taking a reactive approach, many fail to capitalise on the full potential of the data they are capturing and adapt to become proactive data users. This is interesting, because although you can learn from the past you can't change it. Why not use data to look forward, enable decision-makers to make educated predictions. It's clear to me, future key players of any industry will have to embrace data as part of their everyday life, continuously looking at ways to gather and analyse data from multiple sources, both internal and external. To achieve this they will need to build a data habit.

A habit, as described by Charles Duhigg, is a routine, a loop, that allows our minds to become more efficient and conserve mental effort. A habit enables us to carry out basic behaviours without constantly thinking, such as walking, eating or logging onto a device. Charles lists three elements that create whats he calls a habit loop: Cue, Routine and Reward.

Creating a habit takes time and repetition. In fact in Phillippa Lally's study 'How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world', she reports

It takes anywhere between 18 to 254 days to form a new habit. With the average time being 66 days.

Phillippa Lally

Having said that, it's not just a a standard habit that's required here, but more importantly a keystone habit. A keystone habit is a pattern that is capable of triggering a chain of other habits in the lives of others.

Example one

Duhigg wrote about the company Alcoa, where a new CEO (Paul O'Neil) implemented a keystone habit which led Alcoa's market capitalisation increasing by $27 billion.

When Paul O'Neil joined as CEO of Alcoa he inherited one of the most potentially dangerous places to work. O'Neil decided to target workplace safety figures. By tackling workplace safety, it sent a ripple throughout the organisation that was so significant it changed the entire culture - making it one of the safest places to work.

He did this by implementing a routine that required the unit president to submit a report to him whenever someone was injured within twenty-four hours. As part of this they were required to present a plan of action for making sure the injury never happened again.

To ensure people followed this routine he devised a reward that meant only people who adopted this routine were eligible for promotion.

By doing this, O'Neil had created a series of habits. Let's break this down:

The cue: When an injury occurred.

The routine: A full write-up of the incident and plan to ensure it doesn't happen again.

The reward: Knowing that a future injury has been prevented and recognition for embracing the system which could lead to promotion in the future.

The data: Workplace safety figures.

Example two

More relatable to most, is a 2009 study mentioned by Duhigg about different approaches to weight loss. The researchers discovered making radical changes (introducing strict diets, attending the gym, etc.) in someone's life only worked for a few weeks, until eventually they reformed their bad habits and ultimately failed in their goal to lose weight.

Instead, by asking a group of 1,600 obese patients to keep a food diary at least one day a week succeeded where other approaches failed. The patients may have forgotten their food journals to begin with, or snacked and didn't log it.

Eventually, however, it became a habit. Some patients started to keep a daily food log, others spotted patterns forming at specific times of the day so kept healthy alternative snacks near-by, and some used the food journals to plan future meals.

The researchers hadn’t suggested any of these behaviours. They had simply asked everyone to write down what they ate once a week. But this keystone habit—food journaling—created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Again, let break this down:

The cue: When having eaten something.

The routine: Log the food that had been eaten.

The reward: Visibility of eating habits, losing weight and feeling better about ones-self.

The data: Calories.

So, how do we build a data habit?

Unfortunately, this is not a one-size fits all answer to this question. A keystone habit has to be subtle enough not to demand a significant change for someone, but notable enough to command a chain of events to establish new habits.

What is apparent in the examples mentioned by Duhigg is that a keystone habit requires input from the person in order to gain their interest in the outcome - in the data. In the examples above the employees wrote a report or logged data - they were recording the Cue. Therefore, by asking your employees to track something about them, something they may already be doing, their interest in the data will be pre-existing. For example, here are some use-cases that require regular employee input:

• Expenses.
• Timesheets/Time in meetings.
• Emails.
• Annual leave/Sick leave.
• Phone calls.

Organisations are typically tracking these items anyway, so why not give employees access to the data related to them? Show them how they compare, where they can improve or how they could help others perform as well as them.

Other methods to drive a data culture could be to quantify personal and team goals, targets and objectives. Ask them to track them, make them responsible - like O'Neil did.

In summary, to establish a data culture it is critical to make users responsible for capturing the data and/or extracting value from it, i.e. through taking informed actions that will lead to reduced costs or increased revenues. Attributing a person's or team's goals to the data, making the data relatable to them, will help drive user adoption. And lastly, to ensure longevity of your data culture, the requirement for interacting with the data must be frequent enough to form a habit but not so frequent it becomes a burden.

By Chris Lofthouse

Remember to connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter!