Most businesses have a lot of data, fed into reports that don’t answer the questions leaders need answered. Branes takes your organization’s data and turns into fit-for-purpose, predictive visuals that reflect your own insights into your market and your organization’s inner workings. They show you where you are — and what’s likely to happen if you don’t change what you’re doing.
Just like Google maps, we help you navigate in real time, adjusting as you go based on changing conditions. Our work is customized to answer your questions and reach your goals, with analytics designed to make your decisions clearer and your actions easier.
We pride ourselves on helping you capture and visualize the impact of the hidden elements that usually don’t show up in state-of-the-art analytics tools relying on data warehouses, including the “soft stuff”. And we work with you to design real-time feedback on what needs tweaking, what’s working, and what’s REALLY working. We’ll also help you identify what needs to stop.
This all translates to letting you step on the accelerator with confidence, so you can blow past your goals. And yes, also lock in that bonus.
Practices
Our name, branes, is inspired by the hidden dimensions in quantum physics’ M Theory, known as branes. These parallel dimensions are sucked into our world through the influence of gravity. Though maybe not the first thing we see, they affect our world in fundamental ways. We want to help you see the hidden influences on your success, and use that knowledge to blow past your competition and your goals.
Let’s face it, a lot of what mystifies us isn’t that mystical. Like the coin up the sleeve or the rabbit in the hat, once all is revealed the next step becomes obvious. Yet we often don’t see what’s in front of us. Branes practices are aimed at revealing what’s hidden – whether inside your data, your expertise, or your environment.
How do we do it?
Analytics
Goal-focused. We can analyze with the best of them, but often it’s not necessary to analyze down to the nth degree. In fact, often you’d make the same decision even if you were 20%, 30%, maybe even 50% off. Often greater precision won’t change your decision one whit. Use your resources wisely and your analytics where they’ll change your decisions and actions.
Data for purpose. When you see an analysis, do you ever notice the question being answered is being defined more by the data available than the answer you need? Yeah, we’ve seen that too. While you may not have the perfect data to answer your question, often the most perfect data you do have, or could create from what you have, isn’t what is used. We go to what we know, and to what’s readily available. Branes helps you quickly navigate to the next frontier.
Predictive. Most analytics that have not been extensively modeled are historical: what it was. But major new initiatives, business changes, or even just functions without high levels of risk are usually not predictively modeled or visualized. And most of the time that’s smart thinking. But even when it’s not, you’ll probably get just the historical data, and it’s up to your imagination from there. While we respect your imagination, how reliable is it? How often might Jennifer Anniston, counting the number of times the ball is passed, or some other distraction distort your thinking? We thought so. That’s why we do it better – using your data and your brains in less-distractible forms to show you a predictive picture of what it says will happen if you act – or fail to act. We find this sharpens your actions, and your resolve.
Understandable. Lists, tables, a bunch of charts. These are all effective ways to get a point across. But usually those who pull together your information are more tool technicians than experts at choosing the right form or sequence to make your data speak. Can you understand it after looking at it for awhile? Maybe. Is that what you should be spending your valuable time thinking about? Probably not. Taking into account dozens of factors – neurological biases, common weaknesses(e.g., color blindness), decision biases and more – we make it as easy as possible for you to understand and decide.
Change Management
Change is a good thing, even a fun thing, when you choose it. But when someone else chooses it for you? That’s usually annoying, idiotic, or even traumatic. When is the last time you loved a real change someone else proposed for what or how you do things? Were they laboring under the delusion that they’d convince you with their brilliance? The data? Something, anything? Ever seen anyone make up their mind and find the facts later? Yeah, it’s a thing, in so many amazing ways.
What’s a leader to do? That’s where change management steps in. Oddly enough, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Managing the change so that the people in the organization can adapt to it, adopt it, internalize it. And definitely not undermine it – whether loudly and directly or as a sneaky ‘silent dissenter’.
These are people you’re asking to change. And when it comes to being forced to do something we didn’t choose, we’re more like toddlers than robots. All of us. So while we believe methodologies can help, ultimately it’s about people. Whether using Kotter’s 8-Step method, Prosci’s (pronounced Pro-Sci as in Pro-Science) toolkit, or one of dozens of other methodologies like Being First – yes, we’re trained in these and more – they each represent a bucket of tools and approaches to help leaders lead changes that followers will follow. Sometimes change management changes the leader, sometimes the follower, and sometimes the actual change occurring. In the best cases it changes all of these to reach an optimized outcome that will be most successful in the unique environment of the change.
When your big idea requires the team to follow you at the fork in the road, or even create the fork in the road, we can help you lead the team to your destination – or maybe even blow right past it to the next one.