On Being Data Informed
What a World War One helmet can tell us about good decision-making using data
Just about every company right now is rushing to place data-driven decision-making at the heart of their business. Good evidence-based decisioning is as much about mindset as it is about process and yet this is too often ignored. Not everything is an optimisation problem and sometimes we need to ask better questions around the data to go deeper, and to be data-informed and not just data-driven.
When the Brodie helmet, designed by John Leopold Brodie in 1915, was introduced to the British Army in the First World War it was intended to protect the soldiers from flying shrapnel. Until 1915 soldiers went into battle wearing cloth, felt or leather headgear but it soon became apparent from the huge number of fatal head wounds from modern artillery weapons that something more was needed.
After the French army first introduced tin helmets, the British army swiftly followed suit. Yet when the War Office recorded the number of head injuries per battalion following the introduction of tin helmets however, they were astounded to discover that instead of the total number declining, it had actually gone up by a significant percentage. The intensity of the fighting was no different so they might easily have concluded that tin helmets were no better or were actually worse than cloth caps in protecting the soldiers.
Fortunately, they realised that what was actually happening was that fewer soldiers were dying on the spot of their head injuries and that more of them were surviving. In other words the number of recorded head injuries increased but the number of deaths decreased as the helmets did a better job at protecting the troops. It was more likely after helmets were introduced that fragments of shrapnel would cause injury rather than death.
The Brodie helmet represented a masterpiece of simple design and became the inspiration and forerunner of many more modern, technologically advanced combat helmets. By the end of the war some 7.5 million Brodie helmets had been produced. And yet it might so easily have been dismissed and thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of soldiers might never have survived. Rapid conclusion and action from data without thought and intuition can easily lead to misinterpretation and poor outcomes.
A version of this post appeared in my latest book Agile Transformation: Structures, Processes and Mindsets for the Digital Age
