Here's Why Analyzing Data Won't Make You A Success.

Ask anyone who’s been married for more than 10 years if they can predict the next move of their partner.?Right, no such luck.?You might create a range of possibilities but any sort of accuracy is out the window.

A quick look around reveals the world is ripe with data collection purportedly prophesying the future. ?Yet, even with all of the science, exploration and review, no Darwinian expert can explain Man. ?

Ideas don’t bloom from data.?World dingers explode from fertile minds.?Creativity and data are hardly bedfellows.?Every day, data heads to the basement to study the past while creativity gets into rockets to explore the future.

Space X, founded by Elon Musk, burst into existence simply because NASA was too expensive to contract the launching of satellites.?Elon believed he could do better for less. ?Henry Ford envisioned the assembly line in his mind’s eye.?Uber’s founders just wanted a ride. ?

Data should be a form of entertainment about the past.?Historical perspective is a solid foundation upon which to build a business, but leaning on it to cast the future is perilous. The greatest ideas didn’t spring from spreadsheets, they unfurled from ideas improving a life.?

Countless business books sing the virtues of scorecards that measure the right KPIs.?They share data about sales volume, margin, social media impact, internal metrics which is good.?But it’s history.?Here’s the key, if the product is weak no amount of looking backward will change the future appeal to potential buyers.?Aspiring toward evolved products solving customer needs should be every company’s mantra.

There’s a reason behemoths like IBM, Polaroid and Blockbuster became dinosaurs.?A once creative idea evolved into the death spiral of chasing metrics.?Left brainers replaced right brainers, the creative arts of innovation were replaced by the science of numbers. Ultimately their progression logic was trampled by new comers focused on innovation arts.?A failure to evolve means your skeleton will be found later in the dirt.

Ever try to build something cool? Being cool or making something cool is surely an exercise in frustration.?Why? Because cool doesn’t try, it just is.?The infinite pools of available data couldn’t produce the vision for the Eiffel Tower.?The most visited monument in the world requiring a fee, nearly 7M people a year find Gustave Eiffel’s tower fascinating enough to go. Coolness is an art, not backed by science.

A founder of the Cubist movement, Pablo Ruiz y Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in October 1881.?From the time he was a child until his death in 1973, he created more than 45,000 works as a painter, sculptor, ceramicist, printmaker, playwright and poet.?Today, several of Picasso’s works have set records for selling up to $180M.?There’s not a single inspirational statistic that caused Picasso to create any of his works.?In today’s dollars, his estate value exceeds $1.3B.

Today’s boardrooms chase data because it’s easy.?You pay and get an expected result.?Data miners get paid to produce spreadsheets within a mechanical process producing an outcome meeting an expected ROI. ?While data is linear, innovation is all over the map.?It’s harder, more expensive and your crystal ball gets fuzzy.?Vision becomes fodder for anyone with an opinion.?As a result, expense considerations and fear kills most ideas before they can fly the nest.

Risk and innovation are dogs pulling on the same leash. Threaded through every success story is a captain leaving the safety of the harbor for ports unknown where treasures await.?Anticipating rough seas, the best leaders expect the unexpected, unafraid to look fear in the eye. ??

So what are the tricks to innovation and evolution?:

1. Acknowledge the need to innovate. ?Those companies hugging their cash cows and failing to innovate new products have a foot in the grave.
2. Welcome dead ends.?Apple’s QuickTake cameras were a failure but in 2020 Apple sold over 230M iphones. ?
3. Adopt the long view.?An environment encouraging the development of products people want to buy is deeply embedded in companies that win.

Imagine your business as a Lego set.?Like analyzing data, you can be entranced by the blocks and contemplate their design, shape and color.?Or you can accept the risk in the effort to build something beautiful.?Get on with it!?