Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom

It’s impossible to measure progress if you don’t know your starting point. This sounds axiomatic, but too often it is overlooked by associations looking to improve their data management. Measuring progress requires setting initial benchmarks. The new year is a perfect time to establish your data management benchmarks. Some ideas: How many data integrity reports do you […]

A client of mine recently wrote the following to me: “It’s so hard to set up a new database and decide how/where you want to track information when you don’t have a really good understanding of the database and how different fields/screens relate to each other. I think at some point when things slow down

In Dan Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, he writes: “Experience is unobservable to everyone except the person who it happens to.” I found this incredibly profound as I thought about how often I’ll hear from my clients and other association executives, “The software should function like this, because that’s how we do it, and that’s

This one may seem obvious, but when you’re speaking to anyone, whether it’s one person, a staff meeting, or a speech to a large group, you need to know your audience. Never assume that who you’re speaking with is “just like everyone else.” This means you should know something about them, and you should know

Lewin’s equation says “behavior is a function of the person in their environment.” (He was a psychologist and this was first published in 1936). The idea is simple; environment affects behavior. One example of where this principle is applied is in grocery stores. The products the store wants to promote most (i.e., the products they

Signal-to-noise ratio Signal-to-noise ratio, formally used, applies to electricity and engineering, and refers to how much of a desired signal is being received, versus how much background noise is coming through. The same thing applies to your database. The signal is your good data; the noise is your bad data. I’ve argued for years that the

Garbage in, gospel out We’ve all heard the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out.” If the data entered into the system is bad, any reports coming out of it will be bad. Simple. But what about “Garbage in, gospel out”? (I first heard this from my father.) Translated, this is reflected in the attitude of “If the system

Dramatic change does not happen overnight Like most things in life, dramatic change does not happen overnight, and the same is true for improving data management. Slow gains add up fast, but there is no such thing as an “overnight success.” Identify one or two simple things you can improve in your data management. Very quickly

Implementation Intention Editor’s note: I have a new email newsletter, sent weekly, called Wes’s Wednesday Wisdom. Click here to subscribe In James Clear’s new book, Atomic Habits, he discusses the concept of implementation intention. Simply put, this is a statement that puts into words your plans for executing a new habit. As he puts it, “when