74 Kellogg Insight doing this, maybe five percent, says Anderson. So what do most managers need to do differently? “When you take a business action, you need to keep in mind what the effect is on the usefulness of the data that are going to emerge from it,” says Zettelmeyer. That requires the foresight to understand the questions you may wish to answer in the future, as well as the discipline to work backward from those questions to ensure that you set yourself up to get data that are rich and helpful. A company rolling out a national advertising campaign, for instance, might decide to tweak the campaign in important ways only in select markets or to stagger the rollout by region. While there may be short- term costs in terms of efficiency and optimization, the resulting data have the potential to teach the company going forward. Don’t Relegate Data Science to the Data Scientists Such foresight cannot be the purview of a single employee or team at an organization, the pair stress. That’s because decisions about how to experiment should be made with specific problems in mind. “It cuts across the whole organization, so it has to be a cultural change in how we think about our day-to-day operations,” says Anderson. The key, Zettelmeyer says, is “to transport yourself into the situation you’re going to find yourself in in the future.” What data would be helpful to have in order to make the next decision, and the next one? What relationship between variables do you want to demonstrate? And Based on insights from Eric T. Anderson and Florian Zettelmeyer