It’s the Questions, Stupid. Why Our Data Obsession May Blind Us to What Really Matters

There are a lot of good reasons I joined Visier, but perhaps the most significant among them is this company’s remarkable product--and specifically, its approach to analytics. 

Instead of focusing on the data and the infrastructure--the less interesting part, in my opinion--Visier focuses on the questions business leaders need to ask and answer to manage a workforce. Unlike other solutions, Visier stocks its product with a catalog of 2000+ predefined questions paired with pre-built analytics that deliver, not people analytics, but people answers.

The first thing that appealed to me about this approach, frankly, was the elegance and the symmetry of it. I’m a bit of a sucker for what I call “the flip”--people, organizations and institutions that challenge convention by simply looking at the other side of what’s expected. I wrote a blog post about the flip as an innovation technique when I was a Gartner analyst. 

Visier flipped conventions about analytics by simply looking at the other side of the coin: the questions companies need to ask and the analytics required to answer them. It turns out that, when it comes to analytics, this--not the data--is the long pole in the tent.    

It reminds me of the sign the ragin’ cajun, democratic political operative James Carville gave his client then-candidate Bill Clinton during his run for the presidency. “It’s the economy, stupid” was his way of reminding the silver-tongued governor that everything else was just a distraction.

The same can be said for analytics. It’s the questions, stupid. No, I’m not calling you stupid--but I am asking you to consider whether you’re looking through the correct end of the telescope.

I’ve spent a career watching people expect, at once, too little and too much from their data. Those who expect too little are satisfied with “interesting” where “useful” is what they really need. Those who expect too much are fixated on data to the extent that they often lose sight of the questions they needed to ask in the first place. 

Years ago, I co-wrote an HBR article about this phenomenon with my former Gartner colleague Andrew Frank where we suggested a sort of blindness that happens when data becomes our obsession. Ultimately, the data itself should be pretty darn uninteresting in the absence of well formed questions. Sure, there are meaningful exceptions to this, but random exploration through large datasets should be left to machines and data science teams.

When you get the questions and the corresponding analytics right, data-driven decision-making can become like an executive superpower. It can help you zoom in, zoom out, and see around corners. But, the inverse is also true. Without well formed questions, data can blind you to what really matters to the business.