Ever encounter a situation where things seem backwards? Maybe you’ve seen a parent being told what to do by a child or a customer being berated by a service rep. It makes you wonder who is in charge or who is working for whom. I have another thought along those lines today, and it has to do with data. There was a post from AdAge by their data reporter, Katie Kaye who wrote the following about the NY Times piece on Amazon: 
The article should inspire us to question the value of decisions based entirely on data to create business efficiencies at the expense of human empathy and the arguable imperfections that can benefit any organization or project.
I like that. It makes you ask who is in charge here: the humans or the numbers. We all ingest more data than we can consume, and, unfortunately, some of us allow that massive intake to be regurgitated as unconsidered decisions. That’s a bad idea. The data is there to serve us, not the other way around.
I’m the first to say that we need lots of data. Without impartial feedback, we’re flying blind, and data can help us make better decisions. The key there is “help US”. Data without the context of a plan is useless. Data that’s not actionable is useless. Data that causes us to overreact, however, is dangerous. If you watched any election coverage last night, you probably heard a lot about early results and the need to wait for data from key precincts. How many times has someone in your organization overreacted to an early piece of data, only to find out that it was not at all typical of the overall results? We need a plan, we need context, and we need a little patience.
When we chase after outliers, we’re working for the data. That’s backward. Data, and all the other technological tools in our arsenals, needs to work for us. Make sense?
Consult Keith 