David Didn’t Know

Originally published on LinkedIn

I previously wrote about someone (let’s call him David) who spent two months creating a single quarterly report. This went on for nearly two years. To make it worse, David was fabricating reports that no one ever used.

Before I talk about how we compressed that time to two hours and made the same reports indispensable to the organization, let’s look at how David wound up wasting so much time. There were two primary issues: (1) David did not apply critical thinking to optimizing his own activities and (2) his manager did not properly equip and support him.

Lack of critical thinking

David never questioned what he was doing nor how he was doing it. He was given a brute force process that he never challenged. Instead, he spent hours upon hours, slogging through spreadsheets and spawning PowerPoint slides without understanding the purpose or looking for a better way. In fact, he never asked anyone for help.

Had he asked a few questions, David would have discovered that only one person was receiving the report (his boss) and that it was useless because the data was two months old by the time it was finished.

Lack of leadership

But, let’s not be too hard on David. After all, he had not been properly informed or trained. He was a junior resource with no financial analysis or Excel training. His manager needed something for David to do; so, he gave him this report to create with no real direction. David’s manager asked him to produce it faster each time but he never provided support for how to do that. 

David’s manager failed to provide leadership in three critical ways: 

1. Not articulating the purpose of the report and not painting a picture of what the end result should be, 

2. Not providing training for how to use Excel, and 

3. Not providing oversight and guidance. 

Had the manager provided leadership in any of these areas, David likely would have been able to create value from his actions, and in a more efficient manner.

A simple solution

So, how did we solve David’s problem? 

Once we analyzed the data and the process David was using to update the calculations, we determined that the data was clean and well structured; it was consistent across virtually all domains. But David could not take advantage of those consistent patterns because he did not know how to use dynamic references in Excel and had no understanding of basic formulas. After completing a crash course for Excel, David updated the calculations to be dynamic so that when new data was added, the report updated automatically. 

Pausing for a few days to examine the process and receiving proper training allowed David to cut the time from two months to two days. A few months later, we started using a data visualization tool called Tableau and the time went from two days to two hours. The real benefit (other than improving David’s well-being) was that we could now use the reports in near real time to make business decisions.

David’s situation illustrates how we often trap ourselves in a cycle of “just get it done” when we should pause to ask basic questions, improve our understanding of what we are doing, and provide leadership (both for ourselves and to those around us). Doing so can accelerate our effectiveness and increase the value of what we create.

Applying critical thinking helps to optimize our efforts and improve effectiveness.