Discover how data can be your business's superpower as we sit down with James Bolle, the mastermind behind ReThink's insights and data development. In a world where every click and transaction tells a story, James unravels the artistry in carving out actionable strategies from mountains of information. He brings to light the transformative journey of data, from being a mere buzzword to becoming the cornerstone of savvy business decisions
Apologies that Simon didn't click the right button to record the video !! Watch out for the video in next week's pod
#theproductivityexperts
Register for the Produtivity Forum 2024
Follow us on Twitter @Rethinkp
Connect to Simon on LinkedIn
Follow ReThink on LinkedIn
Discover how data can be your business's superpower as we sit down with James Bolle, the mastermind behind ReThink's insights and data development. In a world where every click and transaction tells a story, James unravels the artistry in carving out actionable strategies from mountains of information. He brings to light the transformative journey of data, from being a mere buzzword to becoming the cornerstone of savvy business decisions
Apologies that Simon didn't click the right button to record the video !! Watch out for the video in next week's pod
#theproductivityexperts
Register for the Produtivity Forum 2024
Follow us on Twitter @Rethinkp
Connect to Simon on LinkedIn
Follow ReThink on LinkedIn
Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. Today I have a returning guest in a slightly different role than when we've spoken to him before. Welcome back, james Boll.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me. It's exciting to be back in a new role.
Speaker 1:It is and you've got to give away. We're actually doing video on this one, so we'll see how it goes. We might do it again. We may never to be repeated, but we'll put that on the YouTube channel. You've got a rethink jumper on, so there's a bit of a giveaway.
Speaker 2:I've done my hair, I've had a shave, I've really prepared for video. So if it doesn't go on to YouTube, I'll be very disappointed.
Speaker 1:I didn't do my hair because there's none of it, and then I haven't got my rethink jumper on, so I'm ill-prepared. And I haven't had a shave either, so you're far more prepared than me. Some of you might have seen the LinkedIn post. James is now great for us. I love working with James, and only for a long time. Only Downside is an Oxford fan. But all comes out in the wash, doesn't it, james? With recent results, it's like me, lisa I'm used to losing more than I'm winning. But there we go. James is our head of insights and data development here at Rethink, great addition to the team. You've kind of worked with Sue in a previous life, haven't you? A number of years ago, and we've known each other for a while, so great that James is joining us. Do you want to, I suppose, elaborate on the role a bit more, james, and tell us about the first couple of months in the business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'd love to Eagle-eyed listeners, or I'm not sure that works, but people who've been listening to the Productivity Podcast for a few years will have heard me here before as the culture builder talking about purpose and culture. For the last five years I've been running my business purposeful with a culture builder and many years ago I helped rethink productivity to find a purpose for your business. So, working with the wider Rethink team with Sue and Simon, we came up with a purpose statement of. Rethink exists to collect great data, to surface insights, to create better decisions and discover opportunities for positive change. I loved working with Rethink.
Speaker 2:I've known Sue from my time in customer experience, so I've worked 25 years now nearly in market research, customer experience and employee engagement. My path's crossed with both of you over that time and I've always been driven by the idea that I might be able to use data or use data analysis to turn on a light so other people can find their way, and my career essentially has been a quest to do that. Where it started, in market research, I was helping people understand how their brands were perceived, how their advertising was doing. I worked in 10 years in customer experience helping people understand how their customers felt. And that's where I first met Sue, because she was a client when she worked at Boots, and then we worked together and then in the last five years, collecting data and helping people understand how engaged their employees are and what makes their business special and then turning that into purpose statement and values for their businesses. But that's why I'm looking forward to working at Rethink really.
Speaker 2:So I've got three main responsibilities at Rethink and they're all related to using data to help turn on a light for people.
Speaker 2:Firstly, I have to ensure that we produce terrific insights for our clients.
Speaker 2:So when Rethink Productivity works with an organisation, we want to make sure that the insights we're providing really hit the mark in a way that that data can live in the organisation.
Speaker 2:So I'm responsible for helping Sue make sure that happens. Secondly, supporting the wider Rethink team to get upskilled and to continue to do that, whether that's in Excel training, powerpoint training, whether that's in data analysis and the way we think about data, whether that's understanding client needs. And thirdly, the area that's kind of really exciting we might talk about a bit over the course of the next half an hour is this idea that the way people consume data is changing, the way people want to gather their insights is changing, and how do we take advantage of and exploit advancements in how data can be analysed and presented to help our clients make better decisions. And it's a really exciting mix of responsibilities for me because it's enabling me to use my skills to make a difference for others, which obviously is really great, but it's also stretching me, taking me and taking us into new areas, new technologies, new ideas, which I just love doing.
Speaker 1:Good Now we're delighted you're on board, not only for the kind of football chat, but certainly for all the data things. And I suppose, thinking back, I was talking to Sue the other day and we spent some time out this week where we started out as a productivity company or data capture company, whatever you want to call it, but but more and more we we're a data company. Um, data is powerful, gives amazing insights, tells people things that they think they knew, tells people think that they didn't know, confirms ideas, busts some myths and and legends that are out there. So so more and more, data is the, the epicenter of everything we do from. How do we capture it in a in a simple way but still give complexity? How do we ensure it's in good shape for analysis? How do we analyze, benchmark um, streamline that capture piece? So data is important to everybody, I think in the world, probably one of the most.
Speaker 1:I think I read an article of the day that dated to some degree, is more valuable than gold in in modern society because of the power but data rich, information poor is. Is saying that's banded around a lot or insight poor in in our world. So in your mind, because, because data is clearly your passion. A board statement, but put some meat on the bone. Um, data data is important, but but why? I know it links back to our purpose, but for people listening that thing? Well, I've got loads of data, loads of dashboards um loads of KPIs or PIs. If you've got more than two or three, why is it important?
Speaker 2:so I think I'd come back on a couple of things you you say before I answer that, and the first is so the analogy that I've, that I first heard maybe about 10 years ago, is that data is the new oil. But that analogy works really well, because oil obviously oil is pretty much useless and then, unless you refine it and turn it into other products and that's the same with data by having loads of data is is is actually worse than having no data in some cases, because you don't know where to start. And just to show how cool I am, I was on the market research society summer school in 2004 where you know, as a young market researcher, we it was drummed into us every day that the mantra we were taught was is about insight, not data, and so that's kind of where my my passion is really is is is turning that data into something that people can do something with. So it's data to insight, to action is the journey you want to go through, and the truth is that, like, data is everywhere, right?
Speaker 2:I mean, if you're thinking about your, your business and its productivity, if you're thinking about how you treat your customers, if you think about your brand, data is all around you. There are anecdotes that customers tell, anecdotes that your team tell, anecdotes that that that people can observe on on your business. There are conversations people are having about you. There's quantitative data that you might collect on purpose or by accident, and there's stuff that's out there in the, in the, in the world, through social media, in press, in print, on tv. All this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Data is just absolutely everywhere about everything that you that you need to to manage in your business, and turning that data into something that you can use so that you can make sensible decisions that improve your business or improve your improve lives of your customers, whatever it is that is, is the key, and that's why data is so important, because it is everywhere, and the organizations and the people that are skilled at collecting it, understanding it, organizing it and using it are the ones that have a competitive advantage over over others, because they can make better decisions that align the better with their customers, that save them money, that help them be more productive, and so, whether it's analyzing, like customer preferences or market trends, operational performance metrics, data enables people to make strategic choices that can drive, drive growth and improvement for individuals and for businesses, and that. That's why it's so, so key.
Speaker 1:But, like all being everywhere underneath the earth's crust, you know you've got to get at it and you've got to refine it before it can be particularly useful and I think you mentioned a good point there people, people have lots of data and you know we work name names, but clearly we work with lots of organizations, lots of different industries primarily retail, hospitality, manufacturing and a pharmacy and I was in a conversation last week where somebody was talking about their 50 KPIs and the kind of people in the room that weren't from that organization or kind of we had a bit of a glance round and were like 50 KPIs. So how can you have 50 key things? That must be really difficult to manage because you're throwing 50 bits of data at me in various different dashboards. They talked about Power BI, tablo, different databases and our kind of challenge back was their performance indicators. They're not key performance indicators. So you must have seen in the historic world and clearly what you're doing now.
Speaker 1:People like data. It comforts them in some respects, but there can also be data overload which is difficult to cut through. Yeah, yeah, completely.
Speaker 2:And I think, particularly if you're not careful, you can find data that contradicts other data and you can just end up in a world of paralysis. By analysis, you're just overanalyzing everything and finding contradictory opinions all the time. So I mean bringing a couple of strands together. So for the last five years I've been helping organizations build culture and always use the metaphor in terms of like if you're building a house, you need to build strong foundations, then you build the superstructure, then you put a roof on and then you start adding power and everything and so on. Unfortunately, most businesses don't build their cultures in the way that you would build a house. When you don't, they don't dig deep foundations, they just throw up some walls, dig a pond in the garden and start selling stuff and hope it works.
Speaker 2:In the metaphor, I always compared kind of performance indicators, kpis, to the roof. It's what keeps people inside, what keeps people safe, what helps people know where they are. If you have too many performance indicators, it's too big for the walls and everything collapses and you can talk the best game in the world about what's important to you as a business. If you're measuring the wrong things, that sends a message to your team about what's really important. And so if you are a business and you have 50 key performance indicators, firstly that's too many, but secondly, also what's really important to you as a business, like, how are you actually going to stand out as a brand and succeed as an organization and fulfill your strategy? But it's not by chasing 50 things at once. It's by doing two or three things brilliantly and your KPIs should be aligned behind that and sorting it out, and it's the whole kind of principle around OKR. So just take more word and put it into fewer arrows so you can approach those with more power, and so bringing those things together.
Speaker 2:It's that's the beauty of analysis and the thing that I'm really enjoying about working with a rethink, because we could just collect data and we could say, well, here are four or five benchmarks and you're spending too much time on task and process. Spend more time with your customers. But actually we need to understand the brand, what it's trying to achieve and what makes it special to its customers, because, at its at its root, productivity is about enabling businesses to efficiently delight their customers, and every brand is different and has a different brand promise, makes different brand promise to its customers. They have a different way of fulfilling it, and we need to understand that and then analyze data in the right way in order to help them move that forward, rather than just throw a load of data at them. Like you know, if we go out into a store and our analysts spend 50 days in store, we could give any client loads of data, but it's not going to help them make the right decisions for their brand unless it's organized and put into some sort of context for them.
Speaker 1:So data clearly important, but the cut through of you know what's it telling you? What insights is it delivering? What are the? I suppose the cause to action, which is ultimately where most organizations want to get to, don't they, is the. So what? So you've got all this stuff great. Disseminate it down into some key themes, some key pillars, some key timelines, some key opportunities, so that we're in now to more of the why. So the why data matters, and is it? Should it always be linked to purpose, or are there times when actually it's standalone, it feels in our world. A lot of the time it links back to our purpose, so offering people insights to kind of deliver opportunities, and then it becomes a choice. So is it a cost thing? Is it experience thing? Is it a customer thing? Is it a blend of all of all three? Most of the time, I'd say so, yeah, is it. Does it always have to be linked to the purpose in the why the data matters, or actually Is there more or less times when it can be more of a standalone situation?
Speaker 2:Can be standalone, but I think that I think the decisions that you make with that data always relate to a wider strategy, which should always be aligned to your values and purpose, like when we were together. The day you're telling a good story about a brand who had a very clear brand promise about their products is always going to be handmade Until they had the data of how much that promise actually costs the business. It's just an idea, and so you can collect a lot of data. It can stand alone, but it's in the context of what we stand for is a brand that I think the decisions are are most powerful. But yeah, I mean, you know Data is just a commodity until it's turned into insight and then it becomes valuable. When that insight becomes action and action is aligned with a brand's character of you know what customers want from brand then it becomes truly valuable, and I think that's that's where we want to help our clients to get.
Speaker 1:And back to that kind of. I'm seeing people to say you always tell good stories which I don't. I think they're relevant at the time but then sometimes I come to not, but that one was relevant at the time and that really without naming the brand. I think challenged their Core values is probably the right word of some of the things they still behind, not in a way that says your business model has been wrong, but almost in a way that says, with the current climate, we've taught, taught and taught on these podcasts before around ability to recruit, ability to retain national living, wage costs, which are really tricky for lots of organizations to manage and will be ongoing for the foreseeable. If that makes you challenge your purpose and tweak it, even change it and all the things that underpin it, that's not for me a sign of defeat or weakness. I think that's just good business management.
Speaker 1:And you know, in the news this week, unfortunately, body shop of in the UK kind of going to disappear in trouble. We've seen Debenham's go, we've seen Wilco's go. We've seen my old organization, focus, disappear. Years ago, blockbuster video, we could keep reading them off, couldn't? We will worse. And some of that makes me wonder if they were too, stuck to their purpose to some degree. If some of them had one In the end was was such a big thing that they couldn't change that. It kind of took them down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, the truth about human psychology is that people don't like, people tend to ignore data if it contradicts what they already believe. Then people tend to like data and they like stories that confirm what they already believe. In that respect, if you are collecting data or you have data in your organization that tells a shocking story or a story that's different to what people believe, particularly at senior management level, you need to handle that data very carefully and build a story around it before people will listen to it. People say we make database decisions and evidence-based decisions, but the truth is people just get on evidence that tells them they're wrong, so you do need to handle it carefully.
Speaker 2:Obviously, at Rethink, we collect a lot of data. We contextualize it, organize it and put it into presentations and talk to people about it. I think there's always going to be an element of consulting and an element of storytelling in what we do, because you can't just download a data on someone, even if you've turned it into the best insights in the world, if it contradicts their values and their beliefs. I'm not an expert in any of those organizations that you mentioned that have come by the wayside, but somewhere in those organizations, someone would have known that the writing was on the wall and that the challenges were there, but it's getting people to understand it and figure out what they can help them figure out what to do and inspire them to do something with it. That's the challenge.
Speaker 1:On a personal note, I always think it's entertaining on things like LinkedIn when there's a sway of messages saying, oh, isn't it a shame so and so has happened. And you think ultimately, as consumers, we voted with our feet for whatever reason not relevant to me, not relevant to my family product, not relevant to expensive, not a good quality, whatever not to go there over a number of years. Yeah, we all feel disappointed that this institution has disappeared off the high street. It's a bit of a self-affirming prophecy, almost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you can love what a brand stands for, but it you might not be in its target market or might not be Relevant to you. I think body shop, you know, got a lot of flak when l'oreal bought it because what were l'oreal's values? Properly aligned with it and when I need to rod it, died, you know, did it lose some of its core. The truth is, you know, I love what the brand stood for. Was it relevant to my life? Was I a customer? No, not really. And every, every pound, every dollar you spend is a is a vote, is a vote of confidence in, in a brand, saying that I want this brand to continue, it deliver something that I need and unfortunately, you can, you know, city love what a brand stands for, without necessarily wanting to vote for every day.
Speaker 1:And that doesn't want to keep the lights on for them, visit, no, no and you know.
Speaker 2:So I realize I've got a bit off topic from your original question but, like you know, another story that that we've been talking about recently is about an organization where the team had been complaining about a process that they had to complete manually every day. They've been complaining about for years and years and the brand had or you know, the the organization had traditionally kind of Not listened to these complaints because it seemed petty or it didn't seem important. We think we're able to go in this is actually just before I started full time everything but we think when in and observed the process and saw how long it takes in all of their locations every day, I'm able to put a pound value on that manual process and very quickly that the brand started to listen to those complaints and have been able to automate it. I believe, or looking at automating it. So a small project that cost a fraction of the price it was it was costing them Every year in running the manual process and it's making the business more efficient, because it's saving that salary or people are able to focus on more efficient things, but it's also Making the people's lives better, the people that had to conduct the process every day manually. They hated it. They've been talking about it for years and it's going to mean that they can focus on more important things and add more value for customers, and so it's a win win, win situation.
Speaker 2:But that data existed in the organization already. It was just it was in the form of anecdotes, and so it needed a second source of data to bring it to life and to corroborate it. And that's often what you find with with data and insights as well. In my experiences, is it like this in your personal relationships? In a speaking for myself, my wife might tell me something five times I don't listen to, and then I Happen to be walking to school with a friend and they mention it and I know that is a good idea. You know it's always the second person that tells you something that convinces you it's a good idea, and I think you know that's the.
Speaker 2:That's the truth of a lot of the data that the organizations collect is they already knew what they already kind of half believed the stuff that it that it's telling them, but it's. You know. It's only once you've got it from two or three angles that you will finally take action on it, and you know that's where the stories that you tell us are useful because it can. It can trigger something that everyone already knows and that's, yeah, that's another reason why I love kind of the anecdotal stuff that are on this collect when they're out on site, because A lot of, unfortunately, a lot of employees get have great ideas about their businesses but get dismissed as moaning and then when somebody from the outside comes in and observe the same thing and back to some data, it can really transform the way people feel about it.
Speaker 1:So we've got a new product on the back of that. It's called record my wife. It sits on your phone and it records everything that somebody says to you. At the end of the day it says these were the things that's the expert and told you, just just for reference.
Speaker 2:Please remember that's a top 10 probably is. Yeah, there probably is an AI copilot for marriages that Remember. Yeah, remember. Husband or wife or partner or whatever has told you this three times. Now maybe go out and seek some additional evidence to before you dismiss it anymore.
Speaker 1:Or just get on with it. Good on that low will pause there. We're gonna come back and we're gonna do another episode on what we call the rethink way, so how we produce our data, how we think that makes the data great and brilliant for our clients, look at examples and benchmarking and have a bit of a tour into the future. So Video episode number one done. I don't think it's been too drastic, although we'll see what feedback we get and we'll catch on the next one.
Speaker 2:Thanks.