You've heard the term 'Flight Recorder", right? It's nickname is Black Box (even though they're often painted in "international orange") and they're standard equipment in an aircraft. Flight Recorders measure everything from pitch, airspeed, altitude, vertical acceleration, hundreds of instruments and internal readings, as well as cockpit conversations. They make possible the analysis of unusual occurrences by storing performance and condition information.  Now, in our businesses, we, too, employ measurables; in sales we track revenue and conversion, in marketing we watch the effectiveness of campaigns relative to sales, in H.R. we work to achieve strong employee engagement and low turn-over and in operations we're always looking for more efficient ways of doing things. Those, and many other key performance indicators (KPI's), are delivered on spread sheets with numbers.  I'm convinced, though, that how we get anywhere is the result of such an intricate weaving of a multitude of factors. The numbers provide a basis but what about the conversations? What about the stories between the lines of the numbers?  More importantly, what parts of that data and those stories, and to what degree, will contribute to the "ideal" going forward?    Click here to continue reading this post.