A CEO‑ready guide to building decision power with data — and why it's your competitive edge
What This Is Really About – The practical value of data literacy and why it matters now
Why Data Literacy Matters More Than Ever – Real examples of the competitive advantage and financial impact
What Your Organisation Will Gain – Immediate wins and long-term competitive edge you can expect
What Your People Actually Need to Learn – The seven core skills that transform decision-making
Leading in a Data-Literate Organisation – Your complete executive playbook for cultural transformation
Making It Stick: Beyond Initial Training – How to sustain and build on your investment
What Good Looks Like – Concrete examples of decision-ready outputs
The Operating Model for Sustaining Data Literacy – Governance and structure for long-term success
What This Really Means for You – The strategic imperative and leadership legacy
Every week, you make decisions that could add or subtract millions from your bottom line. The difference between companies that consistently get these decisions right and those that don't isn't luck, intuition, or even experience. It's data literacy.
This doesn't mean turning your people into data scientists or statisticians. It's about something far more practical and valuable: teaching your teams to ask the right questions, interpret evidence properly, and communicate recommendations you can act on with confidence.
The stakes are high. Companies that build strong data literacy consistently outperform their competitors. Those that don't risk making increasingly expensive mistakes based on misinterpreting the data they already have. In fact, Gartner identifies poor data literacy as one of the top barriers to building effective analytics teams, and an Accenture survey found only 21% of employees feel confident in their data skills. In a world awash with information, data illiteracy causes more damage now than ever. Data-literate organisations, on the other hand, are poised to win: as one MIT expert put it, "In a world of more data, the companies with more data-literate people are the ones that are going to win."
Consider what happened at a mid-market manufacturing company we worked with. Their sales team was convinced that a particular customer segment was the most profitable, driving resource allocation decisions worth £2.3 million annually. The numbers on their dashboard seemed to support this view. But when we taught their commercial director to dig into the underlying data, she discovered that the apparently profitable segment was actually being subsidised by two other segments that barely appeared in their reporting.