EMBRACE #1 - The crowd sets six times smarter targets

What if the Chief Financial Officer had to guess what the revenue or the costs for the month were. What if that CFO would ask managers about their opinion on how much they had spent (‘not that much,’ ‘a lot’); rather than get the hard numbers?  That organization would be bankrupt in no time. So, why repeat that mistake? Why opinions, rather than hard data, about the transformation?’

          ‘Then… what’s the way out?’ he asked, suppressing his excitement.

‘Let’s go back to our traction control metaphor. We have 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 ‘wheels’ to manage in our transformation. We need to know what is happening ‘on the road’ and then tell all the wheels what to do. What are the priorities for each wheel? Now, wheels are simple and have only two variables: how much to rotate and in which direction. Unfortunately, employees have much more variables.

Assume the questions in the questionnaire are the only variables in the transformation: usually 20 to 40 questions. Now, you could already choose from many different improvement scenarios for that one employee. Multiply that by the number of employees, and you have an almost infinite amount of possible priority lists.’

          ‘Then … how to make a choice?’ he asked.

‘Here is the key concept.’ She said and slipped him a note.

   ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE = traction control for transformations