Data, Information and Situations of Uncertainty

The general discussion regarding uncertainty, including functioning, behaviour and decision-making in situations of uncertainty and of lack of knowledge, requires elaborating on an additional issue – the question of the information and data required to optimize functioning in situations of uncertainty.

In situations of uncertainty, there is a basic tendency to accumulate as much data as possible but there is not always the tendency to turn the data into information. This means that there is a basic, very natural, tendency to collect large amounts of data from various databases, but there is not necessarily a parallel tendency of turning the accumulated data into useful information.

The ‘ancient world’ (the 1980s) would envy the amount of data that is available today to anyone using search engines on the web. The amount of data is great and sometimes, specifically due to the abundance of it, it is very easy get ‘lost in data’ and not actually process it to get the required information. People used to say that information is power. These days it seems that a great amount of power is needed in order to deal with the flow of information, especially when dealing with uncertainty.

Since using information is the best way to improve the true ability to decide and function in situations of uncertainty, then the data in itself does not tell the story. It is not the amount or quality of the data, but the way it is transformed into information. Again, only relevant and processed data organized according to a predefined logical order can provide the information required to improve functioning, behaviour and decision-making in situations of uncertainty.

In other words, in a situation where there is a huge collection of data in order to make it useful and to use it in conditions of uncertainty it must be converted into information. This conversion is mostly required when there is a need to make a series of decisions in conditions of uncertainty or act under extreme conditions of uncertainty.

Knowledge Equals Power

The benefits of preliminary consultation with experts have many examples. Equally there are as many examples of the great and irreversible damages that can be caused by a hasty action done without prior consultation with experts. One prominent example is in the filing and registration of a patent. Due to lack of up to date information a group of people may make a mistake that will leave their start-up without a registered patent. Investors will stay away from such a start-up and not invest a dime in it.

I will present an unfortunate example of this. Once we were approached by entrepreneurs with an idea for a very interesting medical start-up. A quick check discovered a serious hitch. We found that the entrepreneurs registered the patent in Germany and in the USA but due to lack of knowledge they did not maintain the patent in the USA. If some of the readers are surprised by the need to maintain a patent in a specific country, they should benefit from the lesson in this story. Those entrepreneurs did not maintain the patent and it expired. This meant that the information became public and could not be registered as a patent again anywhere in the world. So, they were left with a product that can only be profitable in Germany.

In spite of the fact that they had an excellent idea they were turned down even before they managed to complete their presentation. The fact that they didn't have exclusivity of ownership on the patent was sufficient to make the investors pull away. A single consultation with advisors in the field and regular maintenance of the patent could have changed the picture completely and these inventors would have seen their idea materialize and become an extremely profitable business.