Is Your CEO A Magpie?
Is a magpie attracted to shiny things, like PowerPoint decks, or is it really just a myth?
How comfortable would your business leaders be if you came to the presentation with an Excel instead of a PowerPoint?
The Love of Shiny Objects
Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) tells of a bird who stole a silver spoon, framing an innocent maid in the process.
The opera was so popular that it is thought to be responsible for the sentiment that the titular bird adores shiny objects, a belief that the University of Exeter put up to scientific scrutiny and found the opposite to be true, the Magpie is actually cautious about new things.
The Eurasian Magpie that visited me on my windowsill yesterday morning, inspiring the absurd analogy.
The Thieving Consultant
Much like Rossini, the world’s top consulting firms have convinced you that your managers are unable to process information unless it’s given to them in a format that is the sanitised corporate-equivalent of an Instagram Reel; attention grabbing but no substance.
And of course by extension, we’ve become convinced ourselves that a shiny, sparkly slide is a better story than the meat and bones of what is actually going on.
The real substance of the insights you derive from your analyses sits in the data and the data-systems that underlie the outputs, if you spend more time thinking about formatting and worried about getting the perfect action-oriented title all of that becomes lost.
An Attention Strained World
In my User Engagement Blueprint, I make it clear that apps are competing for attention with the likes of Instagram and TikTok.
At work you’re also competing for the attention of your managers and you might say that they don’t have time to sit and understand a mountain of data and tabular information in an Excel file.
You’d probably be right in a sense, but remember, graphs are just grown-up Paint By Numbers, so the numbers probably aren’t the issue.
A Structure Fixes Attention
What you need is a consistent structure and approach to the analytics of your engagement data, that eventually gets engrained in the mindset and culture of your organisation (more on this in a future blog post), because that is what provides the context for the data you are presenting.
They will understand that conversion really means an action that leads to future engagement.
They will understand Start-Stay-Stick.
This means that your magpie managers, not attracted by a shiny deck, but rather, weary of being tricked, will be more than happy to see the real numbers.
The story tells itself.
My User Engagement Blueprint provides exactly a structured approach to analysing and presenting app engagement data, you can implement it right away if you’re already collecting analytics data. You will avoid having to spend time formatting slides and coming up with action-oriented titles because everything is self-evident once the system is applied.
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