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  "description": "Lies, damned lies, and data driven.",
  "path": "/blog/2023-09-06-the-data-driven-falacy",
  "publishedAt": "2023-09-07T04:01:18.000Z",
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  "textContent": "\"Show me the data.\"\n\nI stopped to think about what they were telling me.\nThey were demanding irrefutable evidence that what I was saying was true.\n\nBut I never said it was true.\nI said it was my intuition based on my experiences being close to the problem and speaking with other people who were living with the problem daily.\n\nBut my experience didn't align with their data so they decided what I said was wrong unless I could prove it.\nData is what they required to consider my ideas.\nThey weren't going to hear any more until I produced it.\n\nIt wasn't that I didn't think I could gather the required data.\nI knew it still wouldn't be good enough.\nThe person I was dealing with was \"data driven.\"\n\nThey weaponized data to align with their opinions and goals.\nWorse yet, they didn't have an opinion unless they discovered it in \"the data.\"\n\nWhen we become blinded by data we can't answer to anything else.\nWe lose the ability to think for ourselves and have intuition about a problem, and we can no longer be proactive about solutions.\n\nBeing driven by data is one of the worse things that can happen to your company.\nYou will lose sight of the road because you take your hands off the steering wheel.\nYou become disconnected from your customers.\nAnd you lie to yourself and your customers because \"that's what the data says.\"\n\nIf you think you're headed down that road you need to ask yourself these questions:\n\n1. What data am I not collecting?\n1. Who has access to the data?\n\nWhat data am I not collecting?\n\nThere's no simpler way to confirm our own biases than to collect the data we want.\nWhen you dig through data you're looking for supporting evidence and dismissing the rest.\n\nIf you're collecting data you'll always look at the sources you know about.\nYou can't collect data from places you don't know exist.\n\nAnd yet those places are often exactly where our intuition lead us.\nWe struggle with something long enough and then emerge wondering how we got here.\n\nYou may not know the solution, but you have a new appreciation for the problem.\n\nWho has access to the data?\n\nMy very first meeting at Amazon I thought I was in the wrong meeting.\nI must have logged into the wrong bridge because the document I was looking at had revenue numbers for the service I was working on.\nI was certain these numbers were intended for the executive team only.\n\nBefore I joined Amazon I never knew how important knowing the numbers could be to my job as an independent contributor (IC).\nMy years at Disney I was never allowed access to any data I didn't directly collect.\n\nI never knew how much this impacted my decisions until I was trusted with access to the data.\nNo longer was I questioning the impact of the work I was doing.\nI didn't have to have prolonged debates about the most important work to do.\n\nI had the data to help me make decisions faster, and it was shared with the entire team.\nEveryone had access to the some data and because we took the time to measure and present it on a weekly basis it became a driver.\nIt turns out \"you are what you measure\" really is true.\n\nHow to succeed with data\n\nYou should be using data to prioritize work.\nIf you're using it to find solutions you need to spend more time with the problem.\n\nFront line workers should have access to more data.\nYou can't bog them down with all the data, but they should have access to the most important data and more data provided if needed.\nSharing data that drives the incentives you want is much easier and effective than withholding data and telling them what they should do.\n\nUnderstand that no amount of data will be enough and it will always be biased.\nIf you are waiting for the data to exist to act then you're too late.\nData—especially reliable data—is the last thing to come from emerging markets.\n\nData is what separates the early adopters from the majority.\nYou can't drive from the back seat.\nSo stop letting data take the wheel.",
  "title": "The Data Driven Falacy"
}