Decisions --- Data vs Story/Theory-- (Zomato-- Pure Veg)

I never was completely on board with the data-driven decision making trend.

I liked that the big CXOs and business people were talking about it, and liked the term and that it was trending when I first heard it around 2016, but there always was a voice of caution, which was irrelevant to me since I wasn't making the decisions.

Over time, I've understood that I liked it because I had read into the trend that it would lead to better "Decision Accounting".(I'll be writing more about this in a different post).

However, there's this other idea, that I've come to fall in love w.r.to decisions over the last couple of years. And that is the need for both the story and the data that supports the decision.

Today I believe the key to good decisions is the ability to shift between looking at data vs looking at the story/theory that the data lends itself to. (as they call it in linguistics, affordances comes to mind as a good relationship btw data and story/theory here).

The idea is that, you cannot ignore the theory/story behind the data(operations, data collection methods, business patterns etc..) and what story needs to be told (by marketing/PR teams) and rely only on data, nor ignore the data and rely on the rest. The best decisions come from shifting gears between both, and trying to get as many gaps that could be missed.

Okay , now let play the guessing game at the decision behind Zomato's Pure Veg initiative. I won't go too much into the details , as it's been discussed at multiple places, and I dont' want to repeat. All I want to focus on is what kind of decision-making went behind the decision. There probably was data telling them that there's a burning feedback from customers about the need for a "Pure veg" option that only delivers from "Pure Veg" restaurants.

There was some potential extra projected revenue calculations based on this. and that was probably the only story that was ever discussed at all. Well, there probably was a bit of discussion of how much effort it was to roll-out this feature. There probably was no discussion about whether or not distinguish the riders by what colour uniform they wear, or if it was it was a minor detail. Most Indians know there are a lot of "Pure Veg" people who would avoid eating next to them or be very picky. It has also been in the news that some gated communities don't allow delivery "partners" to use the elevators and lifts.

Knowing how India is a country of "negotiated boundaries" it is not hard to see the potential abuse of this different uniforms situation.

I'll now go on to the dreaming/idealistic in me to talk about the ideal scenario. Now imagine, the decision todo or not-todo was a meeting with multiple stakeholders(org. functions like, operations, engineering, marketing, PR etc..) involved and the meeting and discussions had this habit going back and forth between data vs story viewpoint from each of the decision votes involved. Assuming these people were from diverse backgrounds, and they all had the freedom to switch between data and story when presenting these arguments someone or the other would have brought up the big downside of distinguishing the partners by uniforms and alternative options could be found.

To conclude: We as a society/civilization need to find better group decision making that's not only token representative of diversity but also really cares/meritorious of the quality of decisions. We need better metaphors for decision-making that are beyond war general metaphor or "gut-vs-brain" false dichotomy or Kahnemann's Type-1 vs Type-2 systems. We need metaphors that acknowledge the interconnectedness of our world.