Data and metrics have a weird appeal when it comes to decision-making. Leaders and executives believe that making data-driven decisions is unbiased, noise-free, and scientific.
Unfortunately, obsessing over data might not solve the right problems and often serves as a shield against taking full ownership of the hidden side of the actual challenge at hand.
All my life, I’ve been that person obsessed with the far side (often called the “softer side”) of data — the human, emotional, political, and contextual aspects of business and life — that numbers fail to tell. But in the past few years, I’ve spent more than a fair share of my time on the other side, making data-driven decisions that have been critical to the business.
And based on my experience, here’s what I know — data is information, but information without context is just noise. But the real problem isn’t that we aren’t striving for a “balance” between the quantitative and qualitative, but that we’ve built entire organizations, incentive structures, and careers around the measurable — and dismantling that feels impossible, even when we know it’s wrong.
The big question, however, is this — if we all know that numbers miss the human side, why do we keep building systems that ignore it?