Overcoming data fatigue: creative ways to help teams reflect on data

Reflecting on your data is a powerful practice that can provide insights to drive impactful decisions for your program and your team. You can see where there are performance challenges and successes and decide how you want to improve. However, in real project settings, teams often face data fatigue from repeatedly reviewing the same type of information.

Imagine your team has been analyzing the same indicators for years—they can almost predict the slide content before it appears. They are tired of the same old legends and trend analyses, but they know the data is crucial for decision-making. How can we get them to drill down on the data, look at it with an open mind, and stay focused?

Below are a few strategies you can borrow that we use at USAID Learns in Vietnam to level up our team’s experience in reviewing our data.

Gamification

Gamification integrates game elements in non-game settings, transforming how your audience engages with data. The key is to determine the purpose of your games. Do you want the games to promote collaboration among team members? Maybe create an open atmosphere to absorb information? Choosing the right games for your data is crucial and requires you to thoroughly review and understand both your data and your audience.

At the Learns’ data party – a participatory data analysis and utilization event, we used a data matching game, where participants were given a shuffled set of years and service feedback information. We then asked the participants to connect each piece of information to their corresponding years and see how the service feedback changed over the project timeline. Exploring the service feedback trends in a game setting encouraged our team to interact with the analysis results and focus on finding the answer from the data, helping them temporarily bypass the good/bad performance mindset. This process made participants more comfortable giving and receiving insights from each other, knowing that both their contribution and performance are not constrained by binary judgement.

Ask questions and give participants time to reflect

While gamification is helpful, it cannot stand alone as an effective way to enhance data reflection. It is equally important to encourage deep thinking and set sufficient time during the game for a discussion so that people can give explanations to the answers they think are correct. Giving your audience time to consciously explore their answers allows them to actively absorb what the data tells them.

At Learns, we used the following questions to encourage the reflection process:

• Before giving the correct answers to the game – Why do you think your answer may be correct?

• After giving the correct answers – Where were we correct and incorrect? What surprises us? Are these results what we want/expect? What could be the reasons leading to these results?  What could have deterred us from achieving the expected results?

Initiate action from insights

After reflecting on the data, you can ask the audience what action they could take based on the insights gained. This step allows them to see the direct benefits of engaging with the data analysis process. Ultimately, people leave the meeting knowing what they should do next to achieve the desired impact. It also encourages the audience to take ownership of the actions derived from reflecting on data.

At the end of Learns’ data party, we asked each team member to write down one action they would take immediately after the event. These actions were documented and shared among the team to determine who or which team is responsible, the support needed, and the expected completion date. This quick and simple exercise helped close the reflection loop and emphasized the importance of working intentionally with data.

Overall, creative approaches to data reflection can better prepare your audience to take in information, increasing their likelihood of engaging and interacting with the data. Our experience showed that even using the simplest games and giving space for reflection can reduce stress factors and harness the potential of data to generate profound insights and drive impactful action. Whether you choose to apply just one or a combination of the steps above, start with understanding your team’s needs, continue experimenting, and share your story of how creative approaches enhance your team’s experience in effective data use.