News & Updates
It Takes You and the System: From Data-Driven Mindset to Data-Driven Culture
As we think about ourselves using a data-driven mindset at work, it is important to note that our environment—in particular, our organizations—shape our effectiveness in being able to truly leverage this mindset. Imagine an organization where leaders believe the best decisions are rooted in data and so they model data-driven decision-making every chance they get. They challenge their teams to support ideas with data. Embedded in the organization is the belief that data is incredibly valuable and so, accessibility to data is prioritized through processes, technology, and infrastructure. Even more, the organization recognizes that if it expects everyone to make data-driven decisions, it must build data literacy skills through trainings and workshops so that employees feel competent and empowered to use data to tell stories, solve problems, and make decisions. Intriguing, right?
It’s the Journey, and the Destination: The Never-Ending Data Story
In the not-so-ideal scenario where your data doesn’t support your hunch, do you stop there? You might, but there is a lot of learning that comes from results you do not expect. You may challenge yourself and ask: are my assumptions about this problem flawed? What else have I learned along the way? What factors might I have overlooked?
We recognize that taking time to examine your results in the context of your research question, and broader research problem, is not always possible for leaders who need to make urgent decisions. However, the key is to lean into the ambiguity and understand that regardless of the result of an analysis, leveraging data to make decisions is an ongoing process. At each critical point—including the moment from examining assumptions, evaluating data, and interpreting results—there are opportunities to pause and get ‘feedback’ about how we understand the problem and the factors we perceive to be relevant (e.g. the data source, the data itself).
Hawai‘i Economics and Economists In the Spotlight
In Hawaii Business Magazine’s December 2020 issue, Hawai‘i Data Collaborative’s Nick Redding and Kendrick Leong were featured in “Hawai‘i Economics and Economists in the Spotlight” by Sterling Higa, where they discuss how HDC first began as a project intended to produce an index of well-being for Hawai‘i, how the learnings from the project expanded HDC’s work to include unlocking the potential of publicly available data to support better decision-making, vulnerabilities in the state’s data culture that the COVID-19 pandemic brought to bear, and why we must be thoughtful with the economic indicators we focus on as it relates to how we define “economic recovery” (as discussed in a previous post).