Without an opinion you’re just another person with data
“In God we trust; all others bring data”
“Without data you’re just a person with an opinion”
Two of many pithy quotes from W. Edwards Deming, patron saint of quality, poster boy of system thinkers and cultural attaché for the school of organisational transformation.
Fundamental to his beliefs, and success, is that science is the root of knowledge and progress. Science is an explanatory framework. It is an error correcting mechanism. It does not mean to predict the future from the past, but it expands our vision of reality so we are able to better understand our world and how it behaves.
In science, you don’t want opinions, you want the facts, and these must be objective. Your opinion doesn’t count. Why should it? Whether you like it or not, the Earth revolves around the Sun, and you know it by looking at the facts informed by repeated experiments.
So, if you are going to be making changes to how an organisation works, you’d better be able to back it up with data, right?
Well.. The good news is that organisations today have more data than ever, consequently new facts are generated faster than they are able to be consumed or stored. Particularly internal data — the tools used across a workforce on a daily basis generate an enormous amount of data, each a snapshot of an activity or a moment in time, they are historic records of an organisations collective focus, success and suffering.
These are the digital exhausts of the modern workplace, and when combined they tell the story of how an organisation really works. Tapping into history is a powerful tool to both understand the present and plan the future.
In theory, the data has the answers.
But.. Data Does Not Make You Smarter
In practice when organisations look to capitalise on this opportunity, the problem is no longer a lack of data, but having too much of it.
The only way to solve this problem is to have opinions which can guide deeper research, drawing on the mass of available data to distill truth and facilitate new learning about your organisational and it’s unique dynamics.
In other words, without an opinion to guide you, you’re just another person with data.
Peter Drucker, like Deming, is another sage of sense in the world of organisational change. He clocked this long ago when he observed;
“Most books on decision-making tell the reader: First find the facts. But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions…The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of serious consideration of competing alternatives. To get the facts first is impossible. There are no facts unless one has a criterion of relevance.”
In short, inside an organisation, no one has ever failed to find the facts they are looking for, so don’t ask for them. The answers often lie in the opinions of those closest to problem, and the challenge is comparing the alternatives in order to make an objective decision.
Ironically then, it’s opinions that break executives free of pre-conceptions. Disagreement and different perspectives are safeguards against authority bias. By reframing opinions as untested hypothesis, an organisation is able to steer the conversation in a way that yields better outcomes. “We can test it rather than argue it”.
Turning digital exhausts into fuel
ConnectedCompany is a data science & advisory hybrid for this reason.
We know from experience that combining context + data is jet fuel for problem solving and decision making. An organisation is not the sum of its parts, it is the product of its interactions. Complex socio-technical systems where small changes to a team or department can have leveraged effects on the speed and efficiency an organisation performs collectively. Accelerating one part of a process often creates a bottleneck downstream.
Our approach recognises the need to study the system holistically on route to defining any interventions, capturing the opinions of the key staff in interviews and workshops and reframing them as testable hypothesis.
We then deploy flexible and secure data science environments which sit alongside (and do not compete with) any organisations existing investments — and because we have solved many of the difficult pieces of technical work needed lower down in the stack, efforts go straight into testing hypotheses and generating insights. Tricky, time consuming pieces of engineering that often take months to resolve by internal teams starting from scratch. eg.
- Complex data integrations with tools and data sources
- De-duplicating identities and linking usernames across multiple tools
- Learning the language & ontology of a business unit or department
- Bootstrapped models & simulations for common use cases
- Working with temporal activity data
Our success working with companies across all industries and verticals, proves that results are achievable in weeks and not months or years — where the resulting data asset is often extended to allow more of an organisation to explore their ideas through data, compounding the return on a low cost investment.
Use data from your past to support your future
If you’d like to share ideas, test a few opinions or learn how your organisation could benefit from its digital exhausts, our doors always open. We’d love to talk.
