In addition to deciding our new government representatives, this latest election offers us a huge education in directing our behaviors.
Many candidates, election teams, pollsters, media sources (need I go on) were very wrong in their predictions. The differences between those projections and the actual outcomes (so far, anyway) have had serious impacts on all parties.
It’s only human to have an emotional reaction when things don’t go the way we anticipated. Often, we’ll end up looking at situations – and making decisions – much more from a position of what we desire the situation to be, rather than what the data tells us.
Our current situation offers us a few lessons that can have immediate applications in our personal and professional lives. There are four areas that I look to in these events. In each area, I try to focus on finding the lesson by concentrating on facts, both current and historical.
Here the areas I review:
- History – When in the past did a situation occur that we didn’t like – and we chose to pretend it wasn’t true, basically ignoring it?
- Competition – What do we see as their strategy, strengths, and weaknesses? Did we work to mitigate these at our earliest awareness?
- Flexibility – Are we continuously reviewing the data? Are we allowing that data to help us update our strategy for the best results?
- Money – How are we aligning our resources? It is not how much you spend but where you spend it that enables the best possible impact on your success.
I’m sure there are many more lessons in this election season beyond the ones we mentioned above. Like some lessons we have shared in earlier posts over the last seven months with the pandemic, those lessons were built on us looking at historical data where success was found, not just desired.
As for the election, the data lessons presented were mismanaged by both parties. It’s as simple as understanding what the customer (the voters) wished to buy versus what I want to sell (the party platforms). There is also an understanding of what the competition’s strategy is (public information) and adapting your approach to minimize its message in real-time – not after the contest. The behaviors from both parties were very weak.
This trust in data for decisions is why we enjoy our mission at HL Group. Providing real-time, trustworthy data to optimize our customer’s decision-making processes makes their success easy to achieve. Who wouldn’t want to offer a capability for pennies that could drive hundreds of dollars in benefit?
I believe that better-targeted data harvesting and better utilization in this past election could have delivered better results for both parties. The challenge is to embrace the data as a tool to help improve our lives, both personally and professionally.
I, for one, am happy that my work every day is helping our customers achieve their best success where our solution is involved.
