United Airlines and the institutional trap

United Airlines recently lost most of a billion dollars in stock value after a bloodied customer was dragged off an airplane.  The incident was bad but the tone-deaf response from the CEO was worse.  What was he thinking when he defended the indefensible?

This is the institutional trap.  It captures experts and professionals by turning their knowledge against them.  They know everything about the inner workings of their institutions, but they come to believe that the belly of the beast is the entire world.  Their analytical toolkit is a box they can't escape.

What to do with data

After I do a community needs assessment meeting, I generally hand a pile of flip chart pages to the hosting library, offer a ten minute verbal debrief, get in my car and drive away.  What is that library supposed to do with that data after I am gone?

I suggest the following simple steps to hammer raw data into insights and conclusions:

First, just look at the data.  Work all the way through it.  Read every page, try to understand the format and what is being said.

Second, think about what it means.  Any initial impressions?  Anything jump out at you?  Any patterns?

Third, crunch the data.  Count repetitions, tally up yeas and nays.  Try making some bar charts or pie charts out of the data.

Fourth, think about it some more.  Identity themes and give them descriptive names.  Try to collapse categories.  Look for the bigger deeper story.

Finally, come to some conclusions.  Decide what it all means, pick what is important.

This is boiled down from other stuff.  I will try to attach some citations which I would like to keep track of.