Data. I love data. I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m comfortable in the midst of giant glowing, computer crashing Excel spreadsheets or SQL databases or large .csv files. Give it to me however you got it. (Although I’m still not sold on real-time data.) Big data? Let’s get to it!
What I don’t enjoy is making decisions purely based on intuition or gut. I get this tingling under my skin when I’m forced to choose between doors 1, 2 and 3 without something to guide me to a better answer. Prisoner dilemma? Fine. Traveling salesmen needing their route optimized….sure. But please don’t ask me to choose between moss green and soft green without some description describing how and why they are different. I leave that to a different sort of expert.
But what about you? I consider it one of my missions to help the people I work with learn to make better decisions. Whether coworker, colleague, client, CEO, or vendor (sure it doesn’t start with another c but do we really need that much alliteration?) If I don’t make you better I don’t think I’ve succeeded.
Too many people that I interact with are scared of numbers. Give them an Excel file with 100 rows and they become paralyzed with analysis paralysis without even doing a single sum. And it’s fine. In those cases my job is to help them understand they don’t have to do it single-handedly. There are plenty of number crunchers who don’t want to make decisions. Pair up with one and you have the start of a great partnership. So how do you begin trusting the numbers? Start small. Get a couple of straight averages and run from there.
Let your natural curiosity take over. (If you don’t have curiosity in excess and you’re still reading this then I’m not sure what bucket to classify you in.) Let the numbers lead you down a rabbit hole of confusion until it clicks. And if it never clicks then throw it all out. That’s the great thing about metrics and numbers. If it isn’t showing you things that make sense it’s perfectly acceptable to start over from the top. It’s art not math. Anyone who thinks that metrics are science and math is gravely mistaken.