On the organizational side, those companies that actually are “data-driven” — think Amazon or Facebook, which have tremendous scale but do actually do things with data, information, and testing, as opposed to Topeka Tommy who claims to and then makes every decision off his gut — made a bazillion dollars, and their founders got richer than God at some level. So in many ways, it was a data-driven year.
In many other ways, especially at the individual level, it was far from a data-driven year. Belief seemed to murder data in cold blood this year. If you opened a given Facebook thread, or even overheard conversations with friends at restaurants (when they were open), you’d hear a massive misunderstanding around COVID information, health terminology, infection rates, school reopening, distance learning, racial understanding, and more … much of it colored by belief and thus bias, and none of it really colored by objective fact. It was enough to make you think that expertise was halfway dead, or at the very least we’ve arrived at some type of “post-expertise” reality.
So, half the world was buying fancy houses and yachts off being data-driven (by “half” I mean .000000000001 percent) and the rest of the world was screaming into the void and circling the drain based on worldviews their grand-pappy gave ’em and they never really questioned. Nice.
It’s not that pronounced, of course. I am being hyperbolic, and expertise still does exist. I need some plumbing work done at my house currently and I probably wouldn’t ask my chiropractor to do that, if you get my drift. But the stark dichotomy between those who can actually play with data and those who spend all day spouting belief seems worth noting.
Now, could everyone become “data-driven?” Absolutely not. Belief, and narrative, are very powerful. Many would not want to abandon that. Beyond that, many don’t have the “quant” skills to be data-driven, and I doubt education of any level is doing a good job teaching that stuff. So, no. We’re going to continue to reside in a belief-driven world, claim it’s a data-driven one, and present data to others culled from our preferred sources.
Am I right, or off-base?
We’re going to continue to reside in a belief-driven world, claim it’s a data-driven one, and present data to others culled from our preferred sources. We used to trust facts presented to us, but then whether right, left or center or otherwise “facts” got in the way of what direction, attention or focus any particular group wanted. Better to have the focus on belief (by feelings mostly) because any particular group can get people ginned up by moving their “feelings” around. We’ve seen this in droves this year and seen “feelings” in action overcome “facts”. Facts do not matter only “feelings” matter and those “feelings” are to be manipulated to achieve goals or to just confuse the people.
In the admirably cynical ‘How to Lead’ by Jo Owen, managers wanting to influence superiors are advised to present data ‘not like a scientist, but like a lawyer’. Maybe it’s just human nature to find hard data less persuasive than the filters through which we see it.