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SIXTHSENSE Affective Analytics (SAA)

The way people feel, what they think and what they believe about what they are doing is a critical, but under-addressed, element of the actual achieved performance of any process, from manufacturing to sales to healthcare delivery.

To leverage the value of these important dimensions of process performance, we must overcome two fundamental hurdles, the data must be accurate and we must be able to integrate it with all the key financial and operational data, in order to conduct encompassing analysis of potential value levers.

1. The data must be accurate

People are frequently afraid to respond honestly in work settings to interviews, focus groups and even to anonymous surveys
Even when not afraid, most people answer such questions the way they wish to be perceived rather than with true responses
A good example of this phenomenon is that 80% of respondents will say that they will pay more for environmentally friendly paint, but less than 10% actually will. A fact painfully revealed to a paint company through the difficult roll out of an environmentally friendly paint line
Similarly, most employees responses to even anonymous inquiries regarding their beliefs about what potentially conflicting performance variables are more important (e.g. customer satisfaction, shipping schedule performance, quality, output, safety, preventive maintenance, tooling lifetime, etc.) are similar to each other and support the known company policies/objectives, even when widespread operational behaviors and results clearly demonstrate the opposite.
Without a way to access accurate information about the feelings, beliefs and perceptions of the workforce such data is worse than useless. In fact frequently, new policies, procedures and training programs are initiated based on such flawed information with counterproductive results.
Another common example is in a two-week, new salesperson training class for a complex product line of a customer who had very high, expensive attrition amongst the sales force. The class had a wide spectrum of product knowledge from zero in new hires from other industries to extensive among in-house hires from other functions. At the end of the first day the evaluation sheet asked the usual questions about the training, the instructor, the food, etc. Everyone answered basically – fine. No one wrote in the margin that they were hopelessly lost and could they please be fired now to end their anxiety. But, in fact, inevitably a third of the class was lost, a third was bored to tears and the rest were OK. This resulted in 2/3s of the class being at risk for attrition before of after completing the expensive recruitment and training course. The impact on the corporate value resulting from their inability to successfully ramp the sales force in time to capitalize on the window of opportunity in the marketplace overshadowed the program costs by an order of magnitude.
SIXTHSENSE Partners has developed a complete set of tools that overcome respondents’ fears of answering honestly and captures true understanding about the affective context of respondent groups.
The simplest example of these techniques is demonstrated by the above example of the new salesperson training class.
The first question on our new 1st day evaluation sheet was as follows:
The product knowledge you will learn over the next two weeks is extensive, at the end of the first day most people feel totally overwhelmed by the task (but don’t worry it actually gets easier). How would you rate your feelings of being overwhelmed? This will help us craft the pace of instruction.

A. Was today’s class conducted in ancient Greek, or was it just me?
B. Wow, I thought getting my PhD in Astrophysics was challenging
C. I get some of it, but I am a little worried about how hard this is going to be
D. I already knew some of the product details, I think I got most of it
E. I’ve been here a long time, I already knew most of this, wake me up when the doughnuts get here

The resulting honest answers enabled partnering in two person teams the least prepared students with the most prepared, thereby saving the least prepared from failure and saving the most prepared from dissatisfying boredom
By employing numerous tools and techniques to “norm out the fear” of answering honestly, SIXTHSENSE Partners builds a deep understanding of the true emotional/perceptual state and behavioral drivers of the populations with which we work, from consumer groups in market analyses to employee groups in Profit and Sales Lever engagements.

2. We must be able to integrate and analyze this affective/perceptual data with the critical financial and operational data in order to identify the most valuable levers available to increase corporate value

The diverse nature of the data created, extracted from financial, operational, HR, sales and sourcing databases plus the data created from our affective/perceptual data processes and process data traps as needed, have to be normalized, cleansed of artifacts and integrated into one encompassing data set that can be analyzed for significant causal relationships
All affective/perceptual data are integrated with the financial and operational databases using our proprietary data tools and techniques
This synthesis allows us to analytically characterize the impacts of the critical affective/perceptual variables as well as the critical financial/operational factors
This accurate insight into what is driving the behavior of the group of interest coupled with the ability to analytically integrate all critical data sets from all relevant data sources enables us to identify truly leveragable process relationships