Are your dashboards giving you watermelons?

How comfortable do your team appear when presenting ‘reds’ on your status updates and dashboards? How confident do you feel when communicating delays/ missed targets upwards?

If the answer is ‘not very’ .. have you paused to wonder why?

Research for this post tells us that Erythrophobia is the fear of the colour red (who knew ?!) For a relatively unknown term, it’s something that we see many clients experiencing.

Yet the consequences of continuing to report that everything is on track when it isn’t, ironically far outweigh the impact of flagging a performance or progress issue. By the time that the inner flesh of the watermelon has been exposed, the time to remove a barrier, to ‘course correct’ a Launch, Disease Area or Brand strategy has increased and may have gone past the point of easy recovery. Much like a ship, with a strategy, the longer you stay on the wrong course, the longer the journey ahead to get back on track.

Factors for being reluctant to communicate reds and ambers may range from the personal, (bad experience with a previous line manager) to an Organisation-wide culture that associates identification of issues with individual performance rather than process and circumstance, hence creating a lack of psychological safety, meaning problems are frequently hidden.

Alternatively, there may be confusion around what constitutes a red, amber, green in terms of progress – easily fixed by a simple ‘key’ or set of parameters missing from your dashboard? It’s also worth reviewing whether your frequency of status reporting is appropriate if you find that your internal dashboards aren’t accurately reflecting other data sources.

So, if you aren’t meeting your targets and milestones, if you aren’t achieving the internal launch readiness or launch uptake you anticipated and it isn’t reflected in your reporting, then your Organisation is pushing the problem and hence the solution … further down the line.

As with the watermelon, the red is the best juicy bit, it provides essential learnings and allows us to stop what’s not working as soon as possible, and make changes to improve our performance another way.

If you need support to roll out a programme in your Organisation that improves your reporting and rids you of watermelons for good. Get in touch.