AST Digital Magazine October 2017 Digital-Oct | Page 23

Volume 17
enabled databases, and various other forms of
manually collected data from the field to inform
decision-making.
October 2017 Edition
the problem that he was working on was solved.
Spiral analysis contrasts with the approach used
by some corporate executives who begin their
analysis from a firm-based, bottom-up perspec-
tive, which is expanded outward only as needed.
Both approaches obviously have merit.
Peter Drucker (Courtesy of Business Week)
As a result, the Marshals, like many corporate
executives, are at-risk of not only information
overload, but also what the late Peter Drucker
called the “malfunction of information.”
According to Drucker, information “malfunctions”
when it is either transmitted in an untimely man-
ner or it is transmitted in the wrong form.
To mitigate these risks, some Marshals employ a
form of “spiral analysis,” whereby analytical ac-
tivities are begun at the outside periphery of the
information flow and then are continuously nar-
rowed down until a given problem is solved.
This approach prevents too narrow a focus on
any one data point unless such a focus is explic-
itly warranted analytically, which has proven very
useful.
For example, Marshal Joseph Lobue indicated
that he “always started with peripheral informa-
tion and just kept narrowing things down” until
Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will
Make or Break Your Company
However, the key insight here is that peripheral
information should be made a part of the ana-
lytical process, which does not always occur (for
more information see Day, G. and Schoemaker,
P. (2006), Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak
Signals That Will Make or Break Your Compa-
ny, Boston, Ma: HBS Press, and Calandro, J.
(2015), “A Leader’s Guide to Strategic Risk Man-
agement,” Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 43, No. 1,
pp. 26-35).
Information sharing should also be an explicit
part of the analytical process, especially insights
obtained from advanced analytics.
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