Nice little pull quote from here:
Last but not least, gathering the data takes time and energy away from the activities that are supposed to get measured – just ask doctors and nurses, or the chairs of academic departments. For all these reasons and more, metric fixation often leads to demoralization.
I mostly agree with this quote. There are analytic programs — including big ones like Google Analytics, but tons of startups — that are supposed to make data collection and analysis either. Not all these “solutions” actually deliver on their promise, unfortunately, and that’s probably truer in “Big Data” than anywhere. The dirty little secret about our supposed data revolution in organizations is that C-Suiters literally have no idea what they’re looking at most of the time, so I’m sure there are a bunch of Yale dropouts out there up-selling them on some “end-to-end analytics suite” and they’re just throwing cash at it. To ignore the possibility of that happening is folly.
But this whole deal is kind of similar to the old “We spend 300,000 hours/year preparing for one meeting” concept — the “analytic era” or “Big Data” or whatever you want to call it has created a situation where everyone is seemingly running around putting together reports for the top dogs. It’s unclear if the top dogs ever even see these reports, but this is what a lot of us in white-collar enterprise jobs spend time doing. “Gotta organize that data for Tom!”
And don’t even get me started on the issue of metrics and honesty.
The fact is, we’re still in a pretty fraught state around “metrics” these days. Some big companies “get” it and are doing it right, but in general:
- Business metrics are a train wreck
- Performance metrics might be even worse
- HR metrics might be worse than that
- When you hear a frat bro discuss metrics, you want to shove your penis in an industrial fan
To me, the whole deal is this: we think “Big Data” is the wave of the future, and that’s great that we think that. But it completely ignores human psychology. So much of work is about self-worth and relevance. You going to let an analytic software suite take that away from you? OK, maybe you can make more money in the process. Awesome. But what does the money mean if you aren’t relevant anymore and can’t control stuff? Work is largely about control. It’s not really about productivity or output. If it was, do you think HR would own “people metrics?” Do you think we’d have 15% global engagement rates? Negative.
I would personally think the idea of “guesswork” and/or “trusting your gut” is going to supersede Big Data for another 30-40 years, but maybe I’m a naive moron.
Hit me with your hot takes.
I work with Google Analytics A LOT. And I definitely resonate with spending a bagillion hours preparing graphs and useless garbage for a meeting. The boss takes a look and its over. What an expensive investment from the company and what a shitty way for me to spend my time.
But I am realizing, in the real world, things the productivity, efficiency, and creating products that actually solve other people’s problems are not what’s important.
Part of that is because all real solutions are internal. You got a problem? No one can solve it for you. No doctor can solve your disease. No business advisor can help your business grow. Only you can do that, by experience the discomfort and working through it. Then you will eventually succeed. And if you can’t take the pain then you will fail. And that’s ok too, because failure is an experience in and of itself.
99% of the business out there are total BS. They solve problems that they create. Doctors come up with a disease that never existed, treat it with toxic drugs. The treatment creates a new disease due to its toxicity. Doctors name that disease, create more drugs (well biotech creates the drugs, team work) and on and on it goes. Very good for job security.
This is no different in the technology sector. Why do we need all this data analytics? Well you touched on control. That is exactly why we need big data. Humans naturally lived in small tribes of around 30 people max. That’s because that is the largest group that foraging in an area could naturally support.
That is the group size we are comfortable being around. But now, due to technological advances we have cities where people live around millions of people. Not to mention how this impacts us psychologically (hint we are highly stressed by this) it necessitates a lot of data to make it all work and keep people under control (create things for them to do .. aka gather useless analytics, stratify people in castes and have them compete … put the ones that won’t do as they are told and compromise this system in prisons).
By making large groups of people live together, we have create problems that never existed. Contrary to what we are told, life for a hunter gatherer was not that bad at all. In fact, they had way more free time than we have now. They went to sleep with the sun and so their body was in sync with circadian rhythms (no depression for them). Their food may have been scarce but it was nutritious and clean (not laden with pesticides, herbicides, hormones, heavy metals like everything is today).
Primitive man may have had a shorter life span (again we don’t know for sure because a lot of what is passed down is propaganda) but he spent it outside, in nature, with a close group of people that were really united, and doing things that his body was designed to do.
Instead, I sit in a box (my car), then move to another box (my cubicle / office), then move to final box (my house). And I sit and punch keys on a keyboard gathering analytics for stupid meetings. Why do I get paid to do this? So that we can keep everyone organized into boxes by creating problems and then solving them. But that function takes only 5% of my time, the truly productive time. 95% of my time is spent doing useless analytics gathering work to simply take up my time. Humans have to do something and my day is organized by my employer to do useless activities so that I feel useful. That way I don’t just sit around, get restless, and start having dangerous ideas.
I don’t know how this benefits anyone. In fact, I am realizing that I would rather live only 40 years and enjoy the outdoors, rather than live 120 years inside boxes.
In short, I think that big data has a very specific purpose, keep control over social order and keep a certain class of people busy doing useless manipulations so that they don’t use their brain power to figure out how absolutely absurd this whole system is and tear it down. That is the big risk and it is nicely mitigated through big data.
This was really good.
I concur
In our company, certain roles require us to evaluate their performance based on data/metrics that are aligned with the specific role. The high performing people in those roles seem to love the metrics because it fits their “competitive” personality type. They also seem to be attracted to a results oriented culture. We have other roles that don’t fit with having standard metrics that we can track to help with performance evaluations. The folks that excel in these roles seem to be attracted to a more learning/purpose driven culture.
In any event, it seems that you should keep your data/metrics simple and aligned with the role’s responsibilities.