Shifting Perspective Part I: Why Ideas are the Data you Should Care About
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In today's business environment, data rules all. Time and time again, studies have shown that having a data-driven culture significantly increases a company’s competitive advantage. It can be used to drive decisions and inform strategy, but not all data is created equal.
Just as a chess game can not be won with only one piece, businesses can not make wise decisions without both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data provides a snapshot of facts and figures – the king piece that makes or breaks a strategy.
Qualitative data, meanwhile, offers insight into how these facts interact with the people who use them – the queen who makes the moves and ultimately wins the game. Both are essential for success, but together they give an even fuller picture of what is happening in your business.
In our new series, Shifting Perspectives: Using Ideas as Data, we will discuss how vital qualitative data is to data maturity, as well as how to start implementing this kind of data into your daily operations. Today, let’s focus on what qualitative data is and why it’s even more powerful than its numbers-based counterpart.
What is Quantitative Data?
To fully grasp the concept of ideas as data, you should be able to identify and understand that not all data is the same - it falls into one of two categories. Quantitative data is information that can be measured and quantified. This type of data gives you a better understanding of trends in customer behavior and sales conversion rates. It’s also helpful for tracking ROI (return on investment).
These types of data points are invaluable for making informed decisions about your business strategy. Still, they don’t provide any insight into why people are acting or buying in certain ways.
Quantitative data is most useful when paired with qualitative insights – this combination provides an opportunity to understand both the what and why behind customer behavior.
What is Qualitative Data?
Put simply, qualitative data is information that can’t be measured by hard numbers. It looks at the “why” behind a decision or action and helps to explain how people feel about it. Think of it as the story behind the numbers – what motivates customers, employees, and stakeholders to act in certain ways?
By its very nature, qualitative data is the only way to gather and process potential innovations. No idea comes fully formed, so to build upon what customers want and what new things your team can bring to the marketplace, you must be collecting that data.
Qualitative data comes in many forms – interviews, surveys, focus groups, and more – but all offer valuable insights into how people think: their motivations, preferences, and opinions. This kind of data is invaluable for understanding trends in customer behavior and for uncovering hidden opportunities within your target market.
Within your own company, qualitative data provides a framework for tracking innovative ideas that come from your team. You can help foster an innovative culture by engaging with your team and empowering them to share their ideas. What better way to gain insight into what works and what doesn’t than from the people who are on the ground, day in and day out?
Types of Qualitative Data
Just like its numerical counterpart, there are several forms that qualitative data can take. Depending on your goals and practices, your company will want to use a mixture of each type when making decisions.
Binary
Taking two mutually exclusive parameters and asking people to choose will create binary data. You could ask them to label something as hard or soft, right or wrong, or even good or bad. This is great for gauging how the market will respond to a new product or service.
Ordinal
If you want to organize your information on a scale, ordinal data is what you’re looking for. This requires people to choose from multiple levels, such as very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, satisfied, and very satisfied.
Companies wanting an idea of their customer base makeup or their product’s appeal can use this type of data to better understand their target market.
Nominal
Nominal data can be the most valuable source of information available. It consists of anything that can define information without using numbers. This type of data can include nationalities, names, colors, and - more importantly - ideas.
As you interact with customers and team members, make sure you are collecting any and all nominal data because their ideas could be what sparks the next great innovation.
The Value of Ideas
Qualitative data provides an opportunity to understand the human side of business decisions. It gives you insight into customer behavior that isn’t always reflected in numbers alone, such as their preferences and motivations.
By engaging with customers directly through surveys or interviews, companies are able to gain valuable insights into the customer experience and use this data to inform their decisions.
This kind of data can also be used to understand how your team feels about certain aspects of the business. It provides an opportunity for employees to express their ideas and concerns in a more meaningful way, which can ultimately lead to better decision-making.
If your goal is to be continually innovating, simply gathering information about how things have been thus far won’t be enough. You need to be able to gather and interpret the fresh ideas that are coming from your team and customers.
With a rise in user-driven innovation, the things people share are becoming even more valuable. Studies show that listening to what customers have to say can increase the amount a company innovates by a staggering 2,000%.
However, if you don't have a plan in place to collect, interpret, and store that qualitative data in the same way you do quantitative data, you’re never going to reap the benefits. That’s what makes Stormboard such a powerful tool.
Not only does it allow you to seamlessly collect and visualize ideas from brainstorming sessions and meetings, but it also protects that data like the invaluable asset it is.
Any team looking to start taking qualitative data seriously needs a platform that takes it as seriously as you do.
The Bottom Line
While the king piece is undeniably crucial in a game of chess, if you don’t understand how to leverage your queen, you’ll find yourself backed into a corner every time. In the same way, the collection, processing, and utilization of qualitative data is the secret weapon of any successful business.
In our next article, we’ll look at how ideas play into data maturity. For now, know that no matter what you’re trying to accomplish, holding on to the precious data points of ideas will give your company the competitive edge it needs to launch into the future.
Stormboard is the only data-first collaborative whiteboard platform on the market today. Where teams succeed with Stormboard is by creating new structured and actionable data from normal human collaboration in the form of evolving ideas and qualitative data, whether in-person or across distance.
Beyond phones, remote meetings and messaging, the primarily visual focus of the platform is to empower data-driven companies to turn their unstructured human interactions into information-rich collaborative workspaces; enabling data-driven decisions and efficient processes while often eliminating the need for meetings entirely. Human-generated data also survives sessions along with the original context which can be edited or added to in the future.
Get in touch with one of our experts today and get a first-hand look at how your business can shift perspective and find new value in the data you’re already producing every day.
About the author:
A programmer by trade, Nick Saraev is a freelance writer and entrepreneur with a penchant for helping people excel in their careers. He's been featured on Popular Mechanics & Apple News, and has founded several successful companies in e-commerce, marketing, and artificial intelligence. When he's not working on his latest project, you can find him hiking or painting.
