Decision Making Requires Insights Not Information

There was a BBC report early last week about how India scientist PC Mahalanobis - now called the father of Indian statistics, developed the National Sample Survey in India in 1950 in order for policymakers to develop its five year plans by having access to accurate, granular information about India's economy. The idea was to develop a robust and representative sample so that the whole could be calculated from a small fraction through robust statistical methods. The methods pioneered in India are now used by the World Bank and the United Nations. However, current official figures on issues ranging from Covid mortality to education to poverty are all increasingly distrusted by independent observers and experts - which has alarming implications for policymaking and government accountability.

China continues leveraging its five year plan approach to manage its economy at the macro level. You might have heard about the Li Keqiang Economic Index which was named after the current Chinese Premier Li (I had the opportunity to personally attend a meeting between ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods with Premier Li when I was was leading ExxonMobil investment project in China). According to a memo from the U.S. Ambassador to China, Clark Randt at the time, the ambassador had dinner with Li, who was then head of Liaoning province in the North East of China. Mr. Li reportedly stated that China's GDP figures were not always reliable and that he instead focused on three different sets of data to measure his province's success: electricity consumption, bank lending and rail cargo volume. The appearance of the memo in the press then led to The Economist magazine and other China-watchers employing the index themselves, as part of ongoing attempts to gain insights on what was going on in China behind the official statistics.

In the book “Factfulness”, Hans Rosling cited a conversation he had with Pascoal Mocumbi, the prime minister of Mozambique at the time. When the author was asking the prime minister of the economic statistics of the his country, the prime minister said, “I do look at those figures, but they are not so accurate. So I have also made it a habit to watch the marches on May first every year. They are a popular tradition in our country. And I look at people’s feet, and what kind of shoes they have. I know that people do their best to look good on that day. I know that they cannot borrow their friend’s shoes, because their friend will be out marching too. So I look. And I can see if they walk barefoot, or if they have bad shoes, or if they have good shoes. And I can compare what I see with what I saw last year.”?A wise prime minister looks at the numbers, but not only at the numbers.

Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, once famously stated, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When one measure is picked as an indicator it ceases to function as an good indicator because people start to game it. Many businesses and organizations used very poorly conceived of sets of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), providing little evidence of the likely future performance of that organization.

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”?In the increasingly digitalized world where we are all bombarded by more information and numbers.?This quote by Hans Rosling is a powerful reminder for decision making.

Leadership Book Update:

I shared a preliminary results from the?five minutes leadership survey ?and highlighted the 43% chasm between aspiring leaders who asked themselves why they wanted to be a leader vs. how many of them actually were ever asked by their organizations. Here I am going to share some preliminary results of the second survey question which was an open ended question to ask people to share THREE words that they thought best define leadership. Here are the top fifteen words according to frequency of appearance (I manually combined some words into groups. For example Inspire include Inspiration, Empathy includes empathetic etc)

Vision, Inspire, Servant, Empathy, Support, Model, Integrity, Mentor, Direct, Listener, Motivator, Lead, Influence, Communicator, Empower

Here is a cloud for the top 270 words from the survey (Thanks for the great suggestion, John Saunders !). It is clear that people are expecting leaders to show empathy and have the ability to inspire organization through clear vision.

This book will be published with?New Degree Press?in?January 2023. Meanwhile, I will start a pre-order campaign on?July 29?to help cover the costs for publishing the book. Money raised will go towards the editing, cover design, layout design, copyediting, book launch and promotion efforts. Thank you for your interests and support and stay tuned for details.

(Please join the 267,000 subscribers to my newsletter by clicking the?subscribe?button on the top of the article to be notified of new editions, and visit my Leadership?website . Better yet, please join the conversation by sharing your comments. Thanks.)