1. Air Miles seem like a great deal. But I'm not sure they really are. The problem is that you have to do a bit of research and some maths to really work out whether they are a good deal or not. Not an example of clear information! With a corporate discount, flying Upper Class London to LA with Virgin gets me 7,836 "Flying Co Miles" for £3,869 (£0.49 per Air Mile). You can't actually get a flight for the miles without paying taxes on that flight. And on some routes, taxes are a large part of the fare, so you don't actually get close to getting a free flight when you spend them - just a discount. Here are the routes I tried: I was looking for a trip to Havana, where my miles that cost £0.49 each were worth just £0.0088 each. Just under a penny. To save £440 on my flight, I was spending 50,000 miles, which cost my company £24,687. That's 1.8% of their money back. Not a great deal, considering the ticket cost! If I spent the miles on the first New York flight I found, the miles that cost £0.49 each would be worth only £0.0054 each (just over half a penny). To save £195 on the fare I looked at, I would spend 36,000 miles which cost my company £17,775 to earn. That's 1.1% of their money back.
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  2. (follow on to my earlier post on root causes)

    Ok. So you have a thing. A thing that is good or bad or indifferent, but that you want to keep an eye on. You want to keep it good, or explain why it is bad, for example. But its complicated -there are a lot of other things that make it the way it is. So you have also put together a root cause tree. So you know all the things that are contributing to making it the way it is. What next?

    BRAG it. That is Blue, Red, Amber, Green it. Add a splash of colour and, as clear as day, show what is great (blue), good (green), poor (amber) or down right crappy (red).

    This has massive advantages over the other method that springs to mind: scoring. Tempting as it is - as an analyst - to add numbers and decimal places, sometimes they really aren't needed. Sometimes all you need is a really, really simple message. Sometimes BRAG will do. Why confuse things with the complexity of numbers? Why make someone read a number and ask them self whether than number is good or bad? Does adding numbers add value or just add complexity?

    Here's my root cause tree for how happy I am, with BRAG added.


    The lesson there for me is that I'm doing pretty well (green overall!) despite neglecting some things I really care about. Must get on that bike (red), do something to make a difference (red), save some cash (red) and spend a little more time with friends (amber)!

    I also looked back a few years to a time when I wasn't happy at work to see if my 'happy at work' root cause tree worked. Sure enough. Despite having a green or two in there, there were a lot of ambers and reds. It pretty much sums up that feeling I had each morning on the way to work.

    But when I'm happy at work, does it work? I tried BRAGging the same diagram as I would have done after a few months at my current job. It works! It pretty much explains why I was jumping out of bed each morning and racing to the office. My job had the whole package!


    So for me, root cause seems to do a pretty good job. Now the challenge is to use root causes and BRAGs to make better decisions, rather than to use up time analysing past ones. After all, if we analysts can't use information to make better decisions, we are just a bunch of people who sit in dark rooms having fun with our spreadsheets.
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  3. As the New York Times says so clearly: "The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of big numbers. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same."

    So when trying to communicate the annual cost of the Iraq war, the New York Times article compared it to things we could understand, like healthcare, schooling and cancer research. After all: if you don't spend the money on war, you can certainly spend it somewhere else: "The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions."


    This is just great. Suddenly the big numbers mean something. The only other place I deal with big numbers is at work though. So perhaps next time I have to communicate the benefits of a project at work, I'll compare it to the things that money could otherwise be spent on: like shorter lines at the checkout (more checkout staff), cheaper veg and such like.

    I remember seeing this when The Times first published it in early 2007 and loving it. Glad I finally got around to posting it on the blog!
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  4. When you are not happy about something there are probably a dozen or more potential causes. Its usually easy to jump to an idea which of these to blame. But do we really know it is the main cause? And have we even thought about the other causes to see how much each of them is to blame?

    I had this problem in a big way at work. A project wasn't working. Something big. All sorts of systems and processes and people weren't quite playing together nicely and the collective outcome was bad, bad, bad. Each team involved had an idea of what the problem was. Some blamed a system. Some blamed processes that weren't being followed. But the fascinating thing was than nobody involved could come up with a complete list of what all the root causes could be, and how much each was contributing to the poor performance. So we developed a guide (obscured because its confidential - sorry!):


    This shows the three main measures of 'performance': What are the things we can measure to know whether performance is 'good' or 'bad'? It then lists the seven things that can cause performance to be bad. It has to be one of these and all should be investigated to understand poor performance. Finally it branches out in to a tree: If one of the seven things looks like its a cause, it shows you what to check next.

    This was used to great effect recently by one of our projects. Things were looking bad. The overall results were terrible. I visited the country in question and they had used the principles from the root cause tree to really understand it. They could tell me straight away that although overall performance was poor, 60% was due to XXX, 20% due to YYY, 10% was ZZZ and the remainder was a bunch of smaller issues that weren't worth investigating. Amazing insight. We were then able to confidently and quickly focus our efforts on the real root cause.

    Its not just boring work projects that would benefit from explanation in this way. I thought about what it is that makes me happy and came up with this:


    ... which immediately made me realise that I had got the balance wrong in daily life!!

    I also thought about what makes me happy at work, and came up with this:
    A little simpler than the life version, and a lot simpler than the one I did for work. But it gives me something to measure my job against and to judge other jobs by.

    Finally I was looking back with frustration at political campaigns I have been involved in. The bits I was interested in is the gathering of data and the use of data to help increase the campaign's effectiveness. I sketched out a diagram with the overall thing I sought to achieve in campaigns at the top (Improved effectiveness and clear reporting on progress) and all of the things that were needed to achieve this. No campaign I have worked on had these elements. But I have also never seen a diagram with all of the elements on it before. So its not really a surprise that it was never achieved if nobody had ever clearly set out what needs to be achieved!

    So all in all I have fallen in love with drawing root cause trees as a way to understand complex problems and thought I'd write a little blog post to share it. (Even though there are no numbers or charts involved.)

    I guess the moral of this story is, if there is a complex problem out there with lots of things contributing to it, try listing them all and joining them with little arrows. It just may help to bring some clarity.
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