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Methodology

Our services are based upon a powerful new methodology that can be applied to many kinds of strategic, management, marketing, operations, and organizational programs and initiatives to determine what works, what doesn't, and why. The goal is to focus on those approaches that work best in practice and avoid wasting money and time on those that have proven weak or even detrimental.

There are three main steps:

1.   Measurement — Assess the situation and approach + track actions and results

For complex business situations and approaches, measurement requires a wide variety of specialized diagnostic, profiling and input tools capable of being easily customized to accommodate differences in context. Our computer- and Web-based tools are supplemented by traditional interviewing techniques.

2.   Analysis — Link actions with results to evaluate and understand the approach

We model each approach, program or initiative using variables and parameters developed from the measurement step to understand which variables may be most important in producing the observed results. We also look at model structure to understand the range of applicability of the approach — where it can and cannot be used effectively. As the number of approaches we analyze using similar models grows, we can apply statistical techniques to the analysis.

3.   Knowledge — Create transferable knowledge by documenting the approach.

Documenting the approach so that others can use it in their own situations creates transferable knowledge. We provide details on adapting the approach and identify the most important result drivers. Once the knowledge is available, it can be communicated to others participating in the project (see Collaborative Projects).

To use our analytical methodology, you must have a sufficient number of implementations ("action experiments") in a variety of situations to make our modeling and statistical techniques valid. Once validated, these models can provide not only solid performance metrics that distinguish strong from weak approaches but also identify key drivers that produced the observed results in each situation — knowledge that is vital for applying an approach to a new situation.

Collaborative Projects

An important part of our methodology is the use of "collaborative projects" to expand both the number and variety of program implementations that we can analyze. These projects generally involve a number of similar businesses so that knowledge developed in the project can be shared. For additional information on collaborative projects ... è

Performance

While we characterize our methodology as "new", it is really the combination of statistical and modeling techniques and the application to management situations that are, to our knowledge, new. How does this methodology perform? We can draw some early conclusions from results publicized by QualPro, a consulting firm that uses a  primarily statistical technique they call "multi-variable testing (MVT)". They found that:

« 22% of improvement ideas actually hurt results

« 53% of proposed improvements made no difference

« 25% of ideas made a significant improvement.

We anticipate somewhat similar findings in management approaches that we evaluate — up to 75% of approaches implemented by organizations being either damaging or ineffective. This makes knowledge of the remaining 25% extremely important.

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