Pulse 62: The Wait for Perfect Data Is a Strategy Problem

What Gets Lost While You Wait

A few weeks ago, I sat down with the Executive Team of an organization that had just finished a strategic planning process with an outside consultant.

As they put it: "We took the expensive, very expensive route to make sure we had a plan our team felt confident we could execute."

After months of work and more than six figures spent, I was curious what brought them to us. The CEO's response told me everything.

"I feel better about the structure of the plan, but not about how we are going to execute it."

The output looked better. The layout was cleaner. They had done more collaboration than any previous planning cycle. But what they ended up with was a behemoth of a spreadsheet requiring every owner to manually update and track progress.

The likelihood of executing on this plan was actually lower than on previous ones. More structure and more cross-functional collaboration meant more dependencies to manage, more manual input required, and more places for things to break down.

What told me the most about their situation was not the spreadsheet. It was what the CEO was asking for to help solve her challenge. She was not looking for a solution to help bring the strategy to life. She wanted help simplifying the spreadsheet so her team could track and report on progress more easily.

After asking a few more questions, I understood why she had not considered a different approach. Her IT team had shut down the conversation before it started. No new technology could be introduced until the data was in a "good spot."

She mentioned, almost as a side note, that they had been in the process of data cleansing and updating reporting processes for nearly two years.

‍

Looking at Data as a Journey, Not a Destination

Back in edition #56, I shared more on The Hidden Costs of Running Strategy in Spreadsheets. The case for moving off spreadsheets has only grown. Organizations are searching for effectiveness and microedges that help them stay differentiated and focused on what matters most.

Data plays a real role in making that work.

So when I hear that an organization wants to simplify its strategy operations but is holding off on doing anything meaningful because the data is not in a perfect place first, alarm bells go off.

If there is one thing I know to be true, it is that data cleanliness, or the idea that data work reaches "completion," is a fallacy.

The organizations that get the most out of their data treat it as a journey, not a destination. They have a strategy around data, and just like a strategic plan, it is not static. It evolves as new technology, new processes, and better ways of working emerge.

We rarely see organizations come to us saying they need more data, or even cleaner data. What they almost always need is more context around the data they already have.

The KPIs and outputs exist. What is missing is the connection between them and the rest of the plan. If your team is delayed launching a fundraising campaign or a new product offering, how does that affect your revenue targets? And what can you do about it now?

Data gives direction. As leaders, we act on it even when it is imperfect.

Too many organizations are falling behind because they are waiting for perfect data. Unfortunately, the market, our competitors, and decisions that need to be made, aren’t standing still while we wait. 

‍

Three Things Worth Evaluating

So you might be asking: "This is good in theory, but my data is a mess. Where do I actually start?"

Here are three things I would encourage every organization to evaluate.

Set Operating Outcomes

You likely already have these. They are the outcomes you share with your Board of Directors or Trustees, the ones that define what success looks like. The measures that say: this is what we are trying to accomplish and how we know we got there.

The issue is usually not that these outcomes do not exist. It is that they are not front and center. They get referenced at Board meetings and then tucked away. These are the targets your strategy should point toward every week, not just at quarterly reviews.

Limit them to three to five metrics. Make sure they show up in every Leadership team meeting and in pre-meeting reports.

Build AI Into Your Strategy System

When your strategy lives in one centralized place and AI is layered on top of it, a few things change.

Cross-functional dependencies that used to surface as surprise blockers become visible early, with enough context to act on. Objective owners get updates that reflect not just their slice of the plan, but what is happening across the rest of it. And the reports that currently take hours to compile can come together in minutes, with a structure your Leadership team can actually use.

The manual work that has always sat between the strategy and the action gets removed.

Discipline Over Data

One of the most consistent reasons strategies fail is a lack of discipline at the Leadership level. Clean data does not solve for a lack of commitment to the operating rhythm.

Ask yourself: Have you committed to an operating framework? Are expectations clear for when people update their part of the strategy, and when Leadership reviews it together? Are you following through on action items from those meetings, and do your teams see it carry through day to day?

Data helps. Discipline is what actually moves the plan forward.

‍

Strategy Not Limited By Your Data

If your strategy currently lives in slide decks or spreadsheets because your data is not in a perfect place, you are not alone.

Hundreds of organizations have come to us carrying some version of this challenge: real analysis paralysis, driven by the volume of data they hold and IT's desire to get it right before introducing anything new.

Domain-specific AI is changing what is possible here. Not just by making existing data easier to work with, but by incorporating signals from outside traditional data sources, so organizations can make better decisions with what they already have.

The organizations making this work are running the strategy and improving the data at the same time. They are not waiting for a set of conditions that rarely arrives on the timeline anyone imagines.

If you would like to learn more about how Elate is helping organizations make this shift in practice, I would be glad to connect.

— Brooks