Whilst using instinct and ‘gut feelings’ can be an incredibly valuable way to help make decisions, it should always be backed up, where possible, with objective information to confirm or deny those emotional feelings that we all have which push us towards making those decisions.
One of the challenges of running a small business is that if you’re the boss (and there only is 1 ultimate boss) and your emotions and your instinct can drive the business forwards despite and in spite of objective information which proves that you’re not actually correct.
One of the things that the new fortune 500 CEO is always likely to do is review the data streams to see what the objective information looks like and what objective information they can actually get quickly.
So, it is for us at our work and so has been the direction of development for a long time.
The most obvious of this is to have instant access to financial numbers of relevance usually, in my case, to calm the nerves when you believe (wrongly) that your business is going down the pan.
This use of objective information works in both directions and sometimes we get a bit carried away with ourselves and think that we’re much better than we are.
In my world, a good example of this would be counting how many of your implants fall out and doing this is as honestly as possible.
To do this honestly, it’s better to ask someone else to do it and then to give you the numbers at periodic intervals.
Another good number is exactly how much money you’re making (or losing) a month before you take any money from the business which actually helps to show you how much you can afford to take.
An interesting example from way back in my career of objective measuring was an audit we did when I worked in Ilkeston in the early years of how successful our IDB’s (inferior dental blocks – a dental injection type) were amongst a group of 10 practitioners.
In those days, as a young man, I assumed that I would be the best in the practice and when the objective numbers hit, I was actually the worst.
And so, of late in our work one of the things we’ve been interested in developing more closely is actually what our patients think of us in an anonymous and objective way.
Blog Post Number - 3116
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