Randy Mely on the One Question to Ask Before You Send Any People Analytics Request

In this episode of Leading Indicators, Curtis Forbes sits down with Randy Mely, an independent people analytics consultant and ICF-credentialed coach based in London, for a conversation about why most analytics teams perform exactly as designed and still leave the manager's real question unanswered. Randy spent 15 years in people analytics, much of it inside Philip Morris International, HSBC, and Morgan Stanley, and he describes the pattern in one example. A manager worries that the sales team is on shaky ground. By the time that worry has passed through an HR business partner, it has become a request for attrition reporting by department, and the analytics team delivers a polished dashboard that answers the request and misses the decision. His fix is a single question asked before any request is sent: if the number comes back at X, what will I do, and if it comes back at Y, what will I do instead. The conversation covers why the value of an analytics function is set by the people it serves, and why Randy would score a team on how many decisions it changed in a quarter instead of how many reports it delivered on time. Randy also tells the story of working inside a company that eliminated its people analytics function. Other topics include why three systems can report three different headcounts without anyone lying, why a low survey response rate is still a data point, and why people optimize for whatever they know is being measured, with a snake bounty story as the cautionary tale. He closes with why the unicorn analytics job spec screens out the people a company actually needs, and why the skills that endure as AI makes execution cheap are the ones that decide whether a question is worth answering. About the Guest Randy Mely’s view is that most analytics teams perform exactly as designed, for organizations that never asked them to do anything but report. He’s spent 25 years in HR and 15 in People Analytics, most of it inside Philip Morris International, HSBC and Morgan Stanley, watching that pattern from the inside. He’s independent now, based in London, part consultant and part ICF-credentialed coach, and his whole argument is that somebody has to own a decision before the analysis starts. LinkedIn named him a Top Voice in data visualization, which he’ll tell you mostly means he has strong feelings about pie charts.