Anametrica
Analysis:
Linking Performance Drivers to Results
Until you establish which performance drivers are responsible for successful outcomes in each situation, you can't do much with your information. If you want to repeat the program in slightly different circumstances, you have no way of knowing whether the differences are crucial to the results you can obtain. Linking performance drivers to results requires both an adequate number of program implementations under a variety of circumstances and the analytical tools to quantitatively associate performance drivers with results.
Many drivers will be relatively unimportant (but not always!), leaving only a few in control over what happens. How do you identify drivers in each situation? Years of broad-based experience, learning from lots of mistakes, and a systematic way of looking at situations. Our approach here is based on the powerful "system dynamics" methodology developed by Professor Jay W. Forrester of MIT in the 1960's.
Once you have identified potentially important performance drivers in each situation, you can employ statistical and modeling techniques to assess relationships. Statistical techniques typically establish only associations, not causality. Because modeling can establish causal relationships, we tend to rely more heavily on modeling approaches.
The goal here is to identify the subset of performance drivers in each situation that are most important in generating the results you see.
There is one last step in transforming these critical pieces of information into knowledge that you can apply in new situations and that is transferable to others: understanding why and how the drivers produce the results.
Developing and Transferring Knowledge
Only in very simple situations is it easy to see why and how certain performance drivers impact the situation and produce the observed outcomes. In many cases, the outcomes are counterintuitive, a characteristic of many complex systems. Often the most difficult and demanding part of this process is the last step — understanding enough about what is going on to be able to achieve successful outcomes in new situations. If you cannot do this, you cannot use your knowledge or make it possible for others to use it.
If knowledge cannot be used and transferred, it is really not knowledge — just more information.
Understanding complex situations and linkages is what we do. It requires an exceptionally broad background, long experience, and expertise in many areas of management and business activity. Even then, you cannot always get it right on the first try. So much knowledge is the result of many iterations of understanding and applying that understanding. Making mistakes is fundamental to learning; making low risk mistakes is how we prefer to learn.