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Hierarchy appears to be the only option to pull a large group of individuals together toward a common goal. Many insects did it well before humans, but over the last 10,0000 years, humans have moved from decentralised clans into centralised nation-states consisting of hundreds of millions of people.  From the pharaohs to Max Weber’s 20th bureaucratic management structure, we can now exist only in such a system because as a society or organisation grows beyond a few dozen people, the hierarchical pyramid is seen as the only option for the organisation.  The justification is that it is nature and natural.  The “ideal organisation” was defined by Max Weber as a clear and strong hierarchy underpinned by the division of tasks based on specialisation. A fundamental assumption was that each unit takes care of one piece of the chain and the division of tasks within the unit is clearly defined, work can be executed much more efficiently. Weber envisioned this as a “superior st...

As a human I know we all have biases, and we all have different biases. We expose certain biases based on context, time, and people. We know that bias forms because of experience, and we are sure that social context reinforces perceived inconstancy.  Bias is like a mirror and can show our good and bad sides. As a director, you have to have experience before taking on the role, even as a founder director. This thought-piece asks if we know where our business biases start from and what direction of travel they create. Business bias is the bias you have right now that affects your choice, judgment and decision making. Business bais is something that our data cannot tell us. Data can tell me if your incentive removes choice or aligns with an outcome.  At the most superficial level, we know that the expectations of board members drive decisions.  The decisions we take link to incentives, rewards and motivations and our shared values .  If we unpack this simple model, w...

Whilst our universe is full of hostile places, and they are engaging in their own right, I want to unpack the thinking and use naturally occurring hostile environments as an analogy to help unpack complex decision making in hostile to non-hostile work environments. ---- I enjoyed reading Anti-Fragile in 2013; it is the book about things that gain from disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb . " Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness , disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk , and uncertainty . Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. " When writing this, I have the same problem looking for a direct opposite of a Hostile Environment, as in an extreme ecosystem (ecology),   and whilst I have opted for a...

What are we asking the questions for? This link gives you access to all the articles and archives for </Hello CDO> This article unpacks questions and framing as I tend to focus on the conflicts, tensions, and compromises that face any CDO in the first 100 days — ranging from the effects of a poor job description to how a company’s culture means that data-led decisions are not decisions. I love this TED talk from Dana Kanze at LSE.  Dana’s talk builds on the research of Tory Higgins who is credited with creating the social theory “ Regulatory Focus ”  This is a good summary if you have not run into it before. Essentially the idea behind “Regulatory Focus” is to explore motivations and routes to getting the outcome you want. The context in this article is to explore how a framed approach to questions creates biased outcomes. One framing in Regulatory Focus centres on a “Promotion Focus” which looks for “ gain ” which can be translated as finding or seeking hope, adva...

This link gives you access to all the articles and archives for </Hello CDO> “Prevention or Correction” is something society has wrestled with for a very long time. This article focuses on why our experience of “prevention or correction” ideas frames the CDO’s responsibilities and explores a linkage to a company’s approach to data. Almost irrespective of where you reside, we live with police, penal, and political systems that cannot fully agree on preventing or correcting. It is not that we disagree with the “why”; is it the “how” that divides us! I am a child of an age when lefthandedness was still seen as something to correct, so we have made some progress. A fundamental issue is that prevention is the best thinking; but if you prevent it, it does not occur. We are then left with the dilemma, “did you prevent it, or was it not going to occur anyway?” The finance team now ask, “Have we wasted resources on something that would not have happened?” When something we don’t lik...

Click here to access all the articles and archive for </Hello CDO> Day zero, you have arrived and you have 100 days to plan. ( H 0 ) How do you determine if your new company is addressing the underlying issues that hold back data from being what they imagine it can be?  The issues that hold back an organisation from really capturing the value of data are at a  minimum: org structures, people issues, a lack of accountability, and incentives. Whilst having a CDO, doing data science, having analytics, using artificial intelligence, testing data quality, and a world class data governance structure make a difference; true transformation will remain a struggle if the structural issues remain. The question is how do we, as a CDO, test the fitness of our organisation's preparedness for data.  If the results are acceptable to the leadership team is one of politics and is way beyond  the scope of this article.   To test the fitness of your organisation's prep...