Welcome to the Dashboard Effect Podcast. I'm Brick Thompson. And today I've got with me my co-founder of Blue Margin, Jon Thompson. How's it going Jon?
Jon Thompson:It's going well, Brick. Thank you for asking.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, you bet. So today we're going to be talking about a theory you have, what's your theory?
Jon Thompson:My theory is that the Brontosaurus is thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle and thin again at the other.
Brick Thompson:I think I agree, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
Jon Thompson:Thank you. No, actually, my theory, or hypothesis that comes from our history running a private equity backed company, and then working with a bunch of companies here, and talking to many more, is that at the root of most, if not all, business issues or dysfunctions is poor visibility or lack of visibility.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. So I agree with that. And we've talked a lot about this. When we were running the previous company that was private equity backed, we went from a 30 person company to a 500 person company virtually overnight as we brought together five companies. And one of the hardest things about it was not being able to see what was going on. It just made it a scramble the whole time. So yeah, I've lived that.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, we found ourselves in that business going from entrepreneurs of a small company to spending so much of our time chasing down information, putting it into spreadsheets, into PowerPoints, doing meetings with the board, taking calls from the board, and the majority of the rest of our time, trying to figure out what was happening in this five ring circus that we had suddenly created with One Equity Partners. And it was actually a little bit miserable, if I was to be perfectly transparent. So coming out of that business, and then starting this.... Well, coming out of that business was largely the genesis of this business, through a set of series of evolutions that we went through. But it was that we ended up putting dashboards on our SharePoint site that we were demonstrating to clients about five years after, six years after we we finished that PE back business and got back into data analytics. And that's what our prospective clients were most drawn to. And we found our found ourselves creating dashboards and helping people to gain visibility.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, okay. So, you know, you could be extreme and say, "Alright, the root of all issues is poor visibility." Obviously, there may be roots below the poor visibility, but certainly proximate cause of issues is often poor visibility, because in business, if you can know what's going on, you can start to make a plan and execute to actually change it. But you know, the the worst business situations I found myself in, were usually because I didn't even realize I was digging a hole until late into the problem, when all of a sudden it became so obvious. And often in those situations, I've realized, gosh, if I could have only done this, you know, six, eight weeks ago, we could have avoided this whole thing. And that really comes down to visibility.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, it's a good point. And there's a human tendency to avoid bad news and to not have to face difficult situations. We just do that subconsciously, because we're, you know, anti pain creatures. And when you've got it clear up in lights on a dashboard for everyone to see, it doesn't give you that option, which is great, because the earlier you address an issue before it piles up and has a lot of complexity and a lot of ramifications is early. And so a good dashboard forces
Brick Thompson:Yeah, definitely does. And really, getting you to do that. visibility is not just getting tons of numbers in front of you. It's really about getting the right numbers with the right context, and sometimes not even numbers. I mean, sometimes you just need an indicator of hey, you need to go look at this area.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, well, you're jumping into dashboard design, which is also a favorite topic of mine. But just on that point, I would say that the whole goal of what we do at Blue Margin is to render data for a human to consume, to touch the right nerves and change behavior, change decision making, prioritization, etc. It's not for a topic area to consume or a department to consume. It's a human. And so what's that humans natural narrative for awareness, analysis, action? If you can map to that and support that, people will adopt and you're off and running with your BI.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, exactly.
Jon Thompson:But jumping back to the broader topic at hand, first of all, you're right. It's a lack of visibility or poor visibility is not the root of all issues. And in fact, it often depends on what vantage point you're coming from. If you're a finance person, you might say a root of all issues is, is cashflow and poor cash management. Or if you're an HR person, it might come down to people and culture. And that's true. And it turns out all these things intermix with each other. But when it comes to visibility, it is really fundamenta. Because what is business if not being able to see what's working, what's not. Why it's going well or not? And where you need to focus your attention to make improvement. And also seeing what's coming around the corner and get prepared, be able to get prepared, to implement a strategy instead of reacting and putting out fires and that sort of thing.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I think you made a really good point in there, that really resonates with me. It's so much about executing well in business is knowing where to prioritize your time. Because you know, there's always a million little fires to work on. But if you have good visibility, truly good visibility, you'll know which ones are the the high ROI fires to work on. And I think that's so key to being able to execute well.
Jon Thompson:Yeah. In our experience in PE, that was the big issue. We couldn't see what was happening. And as we talk to clients over and over, that is the primary issue. And what comes with that, with lack of visibility, is a number of pathologies, business pathologies, if you will. For one thing, you end up reactive, like we talked about, instead of being able to be proactive and get out in front of issues and be strategic about them. At the very basic level, you spend a lot of your time chasing information, coalescing it, organizing it, putting it into spreadsheets, analyzing it. Just trying to find out what's happening rather than being able to focus the majority of your time on strategy and execution. Sort of your highest and best use.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, exactly. I also think when you don't have good visibility, it can model ownership and accountability. So if you don't have clear visibility, it's sometimes not clear who owns what. I mean, sometimes it is, because it's in a very specific area, but it can definitely muddle it. Whereas if you have good visibility and people are responsible for specific numbers, specific measures and metrics and KPIs, that goes away. So I think that's another really important part of it. I also think that when you don't have good visibility, uncertainty can lead to negative assumptions, sometimes. So you can be worrying, sort of generally worrying about stuff that's not actually worth the time to be worrying on, worrying about. So that's another area where I think visibility is just critical.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, I've tested that theory with a number of clients, and posed the idea that when there is a lack of narrative, our baser human nature seems to kick in, and we you know, as threat-identifying and danger-seeking problem solvers. When we don't know what's happening, we don't tend to think I'm sure it's going great and even better than I expected. We tend to instead get filled with suspicion and doubt and anxiety. And that really leads to cultural decay. When people are not knowing what's happening. They start sharing those worries with each other. It begins to gain momentum. You can really kill a culture, and as we know, culture eats strategy for lunch.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, and I know for myself along those lines, that culture point is so true. For myself, when I don't have clear visibility, I sometimes fall into sort of a micromanagement mindset, because I don't know what I'm worried about and what I should be working on. And so I'm trying to get everything organized. Visibility makes it very clear for me, where I really need to be spending my time and hopefully not micromanaging. And it also gives the people who should be managing those responsibilities around, you know, whatever that metric is that may not be right, gives them the ability to act on it, and we can be in sync on it. So I don't need to micromanage it. I know they've got it.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because the micromanagement is inefficient, unscalable, and fairly miserable for the micromanager and managee. Having been on both sides of that, when you don't know what's happening, you can't help but dig in if you really care about the outcomes. You just end up there.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, exactly.
Jon Thompson:I would also say that, in that micromanagement area, similar to that, a benefit of better visibility is offloading this huge backpack, this huge burden that executives carry to sort of push the agenda of the organization, the strategy, the growth plan, and so on, and feel like they need to put their shoulder to the grindstone, whatever it is nose to the grindstone, and put everyone else's there and just do it by sheer force of will, which is a burnout scenario. It's very difficult to do. I was just talking to a client today, who said that's their issue in their manufacturing process. It's difficult to see where the leakage is and where the the deterioration of margin is coming from, and difficult to know if projects are on track. And so he's essentially out there pressing people, staying on top of them. Telling people let's go. Making them work weekends, or whatever it takes. It's a miserable, miserable position to be in for the leader.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, it definitely is. And I also think without visibility, you can actually think you're working on the right thing. So you might be working on fixing an outcome, but with visibility, you'd realize that the thing you should be working on is two steps upstream from that. So again, it's another thing when you think about dashboard, design and report design, you have to really be careful about what you're measuring and what you're having people pay attention to. But I've definitely been the victim of that one as well.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, any examples handy?
Brick Thompson:For example, if you're not satisfied with how your sales productivity, you might spend time looking at the last step in your sales process, getting that sale closed, when in fact the real problem may be far upstream. Maybe that your top of funnel is not... you don't have enough leads coming in. Or maybe you're doing a bad job with your introductory calls with prospective clients. Or maybe you're doing a bad job with your discovery process to engage with those clients. And without good visibility into how that whole process is going. You might be spending your time in the wrong place. Maybe you're maybe you're just leaning on your salespeople and saying hey, you're not asking for the sale enough or something fundamental like that, which could be totally wrong. Maybe they're doing exactly the right thing. But somewhere upstream, they're missing the boat. Or the company is.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, that's great. And what we found is you have to figure out what those right metrics are, where in the stream, where they're a nice balance of of something you can control and something that has predictive outcomes. And you have to do it for everyone. And when you do that... all the key roles in the company. So the way we define a data driven company is one where all the key roles have easy access to the metrics they're accountable for, and they can see how that rolls up into the overall strategy of the company, the overall growth plan. When you can do that well, you democratize that ownership. And when people have their own instrumentation similar in quality and in accurate insights and nerve touching awareness that the executives have, then you get that ownership by the employee or employees throughout the organization. You get that engagement. And that's really important to get people to be at their highest and best, to be productive. And especially in today's hiring market, if you're not engaging employees, if you're just saying, "Look, you're a functionary, here's what you need to do," the current generation of young employees really won't tolerate that. They're looking for some contribution. They're looking to belong. They're looking to take ownership of their area and make an impact.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, totally agree. All right, I feel like we, we've been hammering this one pretty good. I'd kind of like to get back to the Brontosaurus. But do you have any more points on this before we move on?
Jon Thompson:Let's see. So, I would just quote Lencioni who says that if you can get everyone rowing in the same direction in an organization you can beat any competition anywhere, any market, anytime. That's a paraphrase by the way. And I know that to be true. It's just hard to do. And often we think in a business the way you've got to do that is to have all hands meetings, and happiness ambassadors and all sorts of things like that to get the culture galvanized. But in all of our years of doing business, about 25 of them so far, maybe a little more, we have found that the most direct way the most efficient way to get there, is simply put the numbers up in lights so everyone can see them and make sure they're tied to an individual so that they take ownership. And it automates that process of engagement and getting people to focus on the right stuff.
Brick Thompson:Yep completely agree. It makes me want to go down a rabbit trail of, all right, then how do you choose the right number to put up in lights? How do you put the right context around them? All those things, but but we can talk about those another day.
Jon Thompson:Yeah, well, we could just.... One point that might be helpful.... And it's funny that this gets skipped as companies or individuals are looking to surface numbers for a person, and that is, what's the outcome that you're looking to improve? You've got to start with the end goal in mind. In fact, in our development process, we start with a wireframe, a hand drawn version of the dashboard, because ultimately, that's what you're trying to get to: rendering data for a person to consume. If you haven't clearly defined, "Here's the goal, here's the outcome we're looking to improve, here's the measurement of it today, here's where we'd like it to be, and here's when we'd like it to be there, then you're just going through an academic exercise or a technical exercise and you're losing touch with why are we doing this? It's to improve the business.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay. There's a whole podcast in there. Good point. All right. Well, why don't we wrap up any last thoughts on the Brontosaurus theory? I think you nailed it upfront.
Jon Thompson:Yeah. I think I did. I mean, it's thin, thick and then thin. I also have a theory about playing the flute, which is you just have to blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the other and you're off and running.
Brick Thompson:I like it. I wonder if there's any Monty Python fans out there who will catch these 40 year old references. All right, Jon. Thanks for coming in sitting down. It's been fun.
Jon Thompson:Thanks, Brick.