Early in my career, I watched a company lose a significant chunk of business overnight — a major client restructured internally and rolled off most of their projects and people. The leadership panicked. Instead of asking how to rebuild the pipeline, they went on the defensive — cutting costs, eliminating the most expensive roles, and making the numbers look healthy on paper.
The opportunities weren’t there. But neither was the strategy to find them.
At the organizational level, this story plays out quite often, and while it illustrates concrete “data-driven” actions, it fails to measure the impact on a team that’s literally being halved overnight. Why? Because your colleague and best friend for 5 years was more expensive than you. What level of trust is left in the company?
Yes, data is information, but information without context is just noise.
You’ve probably seen this when a team’s performance review is purely based on metrics — reams of data points from different angles. Yet nobody mentions that half the team was laid off last year, doubling everyone’s workload. Nobody mentions COVID that rewired how people work. The numbers say one thing. The context says something else entirely.