If you are looking to make a change and demonstrate it to others, there’s one thing you must do: capture your baseline.
A baseline is your starting point. It can be done with whatever available data you have – the more specific, detailed and well-fitting, the better. However, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the necessary.
Change is only understood as a from-to relationship. A situation starts as one thing and then changes to another. Too often, we see (and hear) people speaking of change in retrospect. We only understand change retrospectively, but it has to related to some starting point.
If you’re looking to initiate change, document what things are like before you start. This might mean measuring the presence of something (e.g., resources, sales figures, client service visits, etc..) or taking observations. Details help because it helps capture the specific aspects of the thing you want to change.
Our recommendation: take stock of what data you have on what you want to see change. Gather what you have to the best of your ability and consider what can be compared over time. Change is a comparison of like things — numbers to numbers, experiences to experiences, observations to observations etc.. You can always add additional layers of data gathering over time.
We would rather see an organization take action with limited data to start with than wait to have the perfect or ideal dataset in place. Look around, see what you have and use that as your baseline.
When you tell the story of change, that will be what you start with.
Are you unsure of what you have? We’ll bet you have much more data than you realize, and we can help you use that to capture stories of change over time. Let’s talk about how we can help you.
Photo by arvin keynes on Unsplash