Excel’s Hidden Strategic Power: From Reports to Revelations

SUMMARY: By transforming Excel into an “imagination machine” that relies on an AI-assisted all-Excel strategy, users convert routine reporting into dynamic innovation platforms. Through automated flowbooks, anomaly detection, rapid prototyping, and flexible playbooks, they surface insights, challenge assumptions, and accelerate idea testing at a corporate scale. This elevates Excel from static output to strategic enabler—fueling continuous adaptation, data storytelling, and growth across the organization. Here’s an introduction to the new strategy.

In most companies, Excel is seen as a tool for reporting the past. But a recent article in the Harvard Business Review describes a path that Excel users can follow to build future growth.

In Harnessing Imagination to Drive Innovation, two leaders of the Boston Consulting Group wrote that changing international markets, vulnerable supply chains, and continued ecological pressures are limiting growth potential.

“In this challenging context,” they wrote, “companies seeking growth must develop innovative offerings to expand demand. These offerings are, essentially, products of imagination—conceiving of and realizing new possibilities.”

“The trouble is,” the authors continued, “that large companies are apt to forget their imaginative origins. As they grow, they become inwardly focused, prioritizing optimization of existing products and business models over the creation of new ones.” 

To help large companies recover their imagination, they describe a six-step cycle that is at the foundation of a corporate “imagination machine.”

What’s missing from the article, however, is the infrastructure that turns those imaginative cycles into sustained innovation. That’s where Excel Data Plumbers enter the picture.

These business professionals are transforming Excel from a slow, scutwork-heavy reporting tool into an agile platform for imaginative exploration, rapid prototyping, and real-world feedback—often with help from ChatGPT and Copilot. For managers, that means you don’t just get more reports…

You get more ideas.

What’s an Excel Data Plumber?

An Excel Data Plumber is a business professional who designs and maintains Excel workflows to eliminate repetitive manual steps. They replace the Scutwork Strategy with flowbooks—well-structured workbooks that use Power Query to flow data from its sources, through defined steps, to dashboards, reports, forecasts, and other data-intensive Excel work.

Plumbers can update their flowbooks with one command—period after period.

This Excel Data Plumbing^® Strategy, enables a single user to generate dozens of reflows (Power Query–automated reports, analyses, forecasts, etc.) in minutes. And because it frees them from constant scutwork, it gives them the time and mental energy to work on business brainwork.

The implications are enormous—as you can see in the BCG’s six-step cycle that is at the foundation of a corporate “imagination machine”…

Step 1. Embrace Anomalies

The authors explain that companies should intentionally seek out surprising data points—outliers, unexpected patterns, or signals that don’t fit prevailing models—and treat them as sources of insight rather than dismissing them as noise.

Excel Data Plumbers thrive on this.

They connect to ERP systems, public financials from Sharadar, economic indicators from FRED, and more. With Power Query and formula-based screening methods, they flag anomalies and then investigate them.

The result? A culture that expects—and learns from—surprises..

Step 2. Treat Assumptions as Choices

“To evolve our mental models,” the authors write, “we must treat many of the unspoken assumptions and beliefs that underpin our actions as the outcomes of choices, rather than set-in-stone realities.”

Because Plumbers are often younger and data-driven, they haven’t absorbed all the unspoken assumptions that more experienced managers hold. They tend to see anomalies as signals—not noise.

In their hands, assumptions become variables.

And anomalies are their friends!

Step 3. Collide Ideas with Reality

“Collide ideas with reality” means swapping PowerPoints for prototypes. It’s about learning by doing, embracing surprises, and using real-world feedback as your guide—so you build something people truly want. This step…

• Speeds up learning. You find out quickly whether core assumptions hold—or must be discarded.
  
  
• Reduces risk. Small-scale tests cost far less than launching a fully featured product that no one wants.
  
  
• Generates new insights. Unexpected feedback often points to richer opportunities than your original idea

Excel Data Plumbers can assist by evaluating ideas and results with Minimum Viable Flowbooks (MVFs). These are the smallest, simplest version of your flowbook that still delivers core value.

By using them, you:

• Validate your approach
• Gather user feedback
• Uncover hidden requirements
• Avoid the time and effort of over-engineering

Step 4. Learn to Spread Ideas

This step relies on stories, prototypes, charts, and champions to propagate promising concepts across teams, so they gain traction quickly.

To illustrate, the article describes a Japanese company that holds “festivals” in which employees share ideas for creating new businesses.

“The originator of new ideas is encouraged to see themselves as an entrepreneurial hero—they can assemble their own team with automatic first round funding and champion their own idea. This has resulted in the identification and development of multiple new, profitable business lines.”

And Excel Data Plumbers can add financial substance to help explain the business potential.

Step 5. Create Evolvable Scripts

The authors warn us that heavy-handed standard operating procedures can impede not only implementation of an innovation but also its further evolution.

That’s why they suggest companies use flexible playbooks that can adapt as new information emerges—rather than locking in a rigid process. That gives employees the freedom to do what’s needed to achieve superior outcomes.

However, this flexibility needs to be coupled with a thorough analysis of which deviations from standard procedures were successful, and why.

Because Excel Data Plumbers offer significant agility in their reporting and analysis of numeric data, they play a critical role in tracking and evaluating the progress of the new endeavor.

Step 6. Start All Over Again

It’s crucial, the authors tell us, that “companies sustain their imaginative practices over time—all while executing on the daily needs of the business.”

This is similar, they write, to Amazon’s Day 1 mindset—a philosophy that emphasizes agility, customer obsession, and continuous innovation.

And companies need Excel Data Plumbers at every step.

Why Excel Data Plumbers Matter

Few roles blend data skills and business insight so tightly. Data analysts extract numbers. BI teams build dashboards. But Excel Data Plumbers do more.

Plumbers engineer entire data pipelines. They automate data plumbing from end to end. They build flowbooks that connect raw sources to strategic outputs. They embed lean learning cycles. They drive the imagination machine.

They understand the quirks of business data. They know that ERP data could include ghost rows. They know that management may use different definitions for the same metric.

Excel Data Plumbers know that marketing systems may label a campaign differently from sales systems. They unify definitions. They standardize fields. They build dictionaries to map terms. They merge on unique keys. They de-duplicate.

They also combine code and clicks. They use Power Query’s UI when it suffices. They write M code when they need transformers. They embed Python for advanced analytics. They prompt AI to generate new scenarios. They design user-friendly dashboards. They add data storytelling text boxes to guide stakeholders. They package everything in flowbooks.

Closing Thoughts

Innovation is not a one-time event. It is a relentless cycle. HBR’s six steps define how to build a corporate imagination machine. But without the right plumbing, the machine stalls.

You need data to flow cleanly. You need anomalies to surface. You need assumptions to be fluid. You need rapid prototyping. You need shareable scripts. You need continuous loops. And you need to generate insight-rich new value.

Excel Data Plumbers deliver all of that. They build flowbooks that run with one click. They automate anomaly detection. They treat every assumption as a variable. They build Minimum Viable Flowbooks in minutes. They spread ideas with shareable tools. They design evolvable scripts. They kick off the next cycle with a scheduled refresh.

In short, Excel Data Plumbers turn raw data into rocket fuel for innovation. They power the corporate imagination machine. And they keep it humming.

Turn routine Excel reporting into a launchpad for innovation. Join the EDP Institute today.