The Importance of Research in Decision Making
Business research is necessary to gather crucial information about your customers and competitors. It allows you to make decisions that are accurate, effective and cost-efficient.
The formal definition of research is a systematic investigation to discover new information and/or understand previously unknown concepts. Researchers are expected to use unbiased methods and present data that is solid enough for others to accept as credible.
1. Gathering Facts and Statistics
When it comes to decision making, a balance between data-driven insights and human intuition is key. However, it can be easy for professionals to fall into the trap of favouring one over the other.
When faced with a new business challenge, a team must be able to identify and assess their options. This is why it’s important to have a process in place that encourages the use of research.
Statistics are an essential tool for this process, as they provide an objective perspective on a situation that could be potentially harmful to the organization or its clients. They can also be used to determine the urgency of a specific issue, which will then inform the development of policy and programs that are designed to tackle it.
The most successful teams often blend their intuition with the facts they can gather from external and internal sources. This includes scholarly publications, professional events and one-on-one meetings with colleagues and mentors.
2. Analyzing the Data
In the world of business, relying on gut instinct and past experience can be a slippery slope. To avoid making poor decisions, it’s important to take the time to analyze the data you have access to and make use of any insights that may prove useful.
While numbers and statistics play a huge role in quantitative data analysis, it’s important to look for the “why.” This will help you get more value out of your analytical efforts.
Research impacts a variety of things in the long-term, from business operations to policy development. Incorporating research into decision-making helps ensure that businesses and policies are effective, efficient and sustainable. This is why it’s so vital for organizations to invest in research and continue collecting accurate, reliable information. This will help them remain competitive in the ever-changing business landscape. Research also allows for the development of more effective strategies and initiatives that promote business growth, sustainability and success in the long-term.
3. Developing a Theory of Change
A theory of change is a tool for articulating the change process in your programme or project. It is best developed at the outset, during program planning, although it can be refined at any time through monitoring and evaluation data.
To begin the development of a theory of change, your team should decide what is the long-term impact you want to achieve. This should be a workable impact statement that everyone can agree upon and understand. It may be helpful to have a trained external facilitator guide the group in this process.
Once the long-term impact has been agreed upon, the next step is to determine which outcomes need to be achieved in order to reach that outcome. It is important that these are concrete, measurable and prioritised so they can be tracked and reported on. This information will then form part of your evidence base. It can also help you to design your intervention by showing you which approaches have worked in the past to bring about your intended outcomes.
4. Applying the Theory of Change
Articulating the underlying rationale of an initiative is not just about appeasing funding agencies. It allows a project team to reach consensus on its underlying assumptions and codify them in an explicit product (often displayed as a diagram). This approach helps a team work toward understanding “under what conditions does something work?” rather than simply asking “does it work?”
A theory of change articulates both the how and why of a project, providing a framework for describing project goals, activities and outcomes. It includes an explanation of how a specific intervention will achieve its desired results and is informed by existing research and theory about how change happens.
Ideally, a project team uses change theory to help it articulate the measurable indicators that can be used to determine whether or not each long-term outcome and precondition has been achieved. This helps a project team plan its interventions intentionally as compared to planning them first and then stipulating what it hopes to achieve.