Harry Bailey, harrybailey.com
If you work in a digital team, there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time looking at numbers. Dashboards open on screens. Reports arrive at the end of the month. Metrics get pulled into slides for updates and reviews.
None of that is unusual. What is more interesting is how often all that reporting changes very little. The numbers look fine, or at least familiar. Everyone agrees things are broadly heading in the right direction. Then the next report turns up and the cycle repeats.
Somewhere along the way, reporting quietly became the job. And the idea that more reporting leads to better decisions stopped getting questioned.
I see this most clearly in teams that are busy and capable. The work gets shipped. Clients are happy enough. The reports are thorough. But progress feels slower than it should.
The reporting is doing its job, but the opportunities for learning are being missed.
A few patterns tend to show up when this happens. Reports grow longer over time. New metrics get added, but rarely removed. Everything feels important, so nothing really stands out. People skim, pick out a couple of familiar numbers, and move on.
Decisions often get made elsewhere, in conversations and especially under pressure. The reporting then arrives afterwards, acting more like confirmation than input. Dashboards are built so anyone can see what is going on, but they do not help anyone work out what to do next.
Teams get really good at tracking performance. Where they're less practiced is at pausing to ask why something changed, or why it didn't.
This is where the difference between reporting and insight starts to matter.
Reporting is about describing what has happened. Traffic went up. Capacity dipped. Delivery slowed. Revenue beat forecast. It gives you a picture of the past.
Insight starts when someone looks at that picture and gets curious about it. Why did this change. Why did this not do what we expected. What is different this time.
More importantly, insight has somewhere to go. Decisions are nudged. It encourages small changes. It leads to something being trialled, stopped, or explored more thoroughly.
Without that step it is hard to call it insight. It is just information sitting still. It only highlights emergencies.
This is not about clever analysis or impressive charts. The most useful insight is often quite ordinary sounding. It just happens to be timely and tied to a real choice the team is facing.
Once insight is treated that way, it tends to pull teams towards testing and learning without much effort.
A question turns into an assumption. The assumption turns into a small experiment. The experiment tells you whether you were close to the mark. Either way, you know more than you did before.
Over time, that loop gets tighter. Teams get quicker at spotting what matters and quicker at letting go of ideas that do not hold up. The work improves because the thinking around it keeps moving. The data stays imperfect.
For smaller teams especially this is often the difference between feeling busy and feeling effective.
When reporting is not leading to that kind of movement, it is usually worth changing how it is used rather than adding more of it.
Starting with a question helps. Opening a dashboard with a vague sense of “let’s see where we are” rarely leads anywhere. Opening it with something you are trying to understand in mind often does.
It also helps to be ruthless about metrics. If a number cannot influence a decision you might realistically make, it is probably just background noise. Removing metrics can feel risky, but it often creates more focus, not less.
Reports work better as prompts for conversation than as finished artefacts. The value is rarely in the document itself. It is in the discussion that follows, especially when people feel able to say they are unsure or surprised.
Linking what you notice to a next step matters too. That step does not need to be big or confident. It just needs to exist. Otherwise the insight fades as soon as the next delivery problem or meeting takes over.
And it is worth revisiting insight regularly. What felt true last quarter might not hold now. Letting ideas age without challenge is one of the easiest ways reporting slips back into habit.
Manchester has no shortage of digital ambition or technical capability. The tools are strong. The pace is high. What is often missing is the breathing room to really learn from what is already being measured. Small steps innovation.
The teams that seem to move fastest are rarely the ones with the most elaborate reporting. They are usually the ones that use data as a way into better conversations and clearer choices.
If reporting is taking up a lot of space but progress feels muted, it might be worth asking a simple question the next time a report lands. What would we actually do differently if this told us something new.
