The Three Rs Of Learning New Things About Your Business

Research is creating new knowledge.

Are you afraid of sharks? Most people would say, “Yes.”

Now, how about cows? Are you afraid of them? Most people would say, “No.”

But here are the actual statistics. Sharks kill on average only one American a year. Cows? Well, they gore or mutilate twenty Americans a year on average. In other words, you’re twenty times more likely to be harmed by cattle than a shark!

There is a primal fear attached to creatures like sharks, mountain lions, and other predators. At the same time, we aren’t terrified of, yes, cows … but also choices we make routinely do harm many of us, such as smoking, eating too much junk food, and repeatedly getting into abusive relationships.

The truth is we simply aren’t as logical as we think we are. Econo­mists and social scientists used to believe human beings primarily made decisions based on hard data and not on whims or emotions — a vision they labeled “homo economicus,” which assumes a person will act in their best interests when given accurate information. But that idea was flipped upside down by researchers investigating how we really perceive risk, which can be completely illogical, as noted in our cows vs. sharks example.

Business Research: Plugging into Objective Reality

Emotions can also drive business leaders to focus on the wrong organizational areas and ignore problems that are right under their noses. What you don’t know can kill your business. To really determine what’s happening within your organization through business research, I advise these three steps:

1. Results

This first step involves doing what’s basically a diag­nostic check of the company’s health. The word “results” can refer to a number of things: goals, outcomes, key performance indicators (KPIs), or milestones. Whatever terminology an organization uses, ultimately it’s all about being able to document those results in an actionable manner. Those results should then be matched up with what the results should be, not just for you, your team, or your entire organization but, more importantly, for your customers, so you can see if you’re falling short or meeting their expectations.

2. Reconnaissance

The reconnaissance stage is generally a passive process. You gather data on the people involved just by observing and asking questions. That quest begins with watching how people interact with each other. How is the leadership interacting with the team under fire? How does that team interact with other departments in the company? This is where you want to ask open-ended questions of employees. If they can’t just answer “yes” or “no,” they’re forced to talk for a longer period of time.

3. Review

During this step, sort all the information you’ve gathered to that point into two distinct categories: areas of friction and areas of value creation. As you may have guessed, the former holds the company back, and the latter moves the company forward.

Areas of friction in a company represent all the things that are preventing success, both in terms of low internal productivity as well as what is creating customer dissatisfaction. The opposite end of the spectrum is value creation. When you align your business research from inside the company all the way to the customer experience, you can more easily see where there are opportunities to improve value elements.

Results. Reconnaissance. Review. The three Rs of business research create the groundwork for lasting success and should be revisited on a regular basis. Business research should be a fluid process — a feedback loop that is constantly informing adjustments along the way, but again, always based in reality. Our intuition is never enough. Reliable information is what tells the real story. And the right business research provides a firm and factual basis for moving forward.