Known unknowns

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

Donald Rumsfeld

10 years ago when I started The Mix, we got briefed by a client on a project.?About a month into the project, they realised that the exact same project had already been commissioned only the previous year and had been promptly filed and forgotten about.

An isolated incident? I fear not.?This happens all the time in business.?Research gets a bad rep for not being useful, budgets get spaffed, it’s a monumental waste of resources.

I wrote rencently about the crushing weight of crap marketing in the world. This week I turn my attention to the tsunami of information that insight people and marketers have to deal with and the fallout that is felt in business – that fallout being that research is not done sustainably and I don’t mean climate change here, I mean work that is properly used and absorbed so you don’t have to keep doing the same things over and hoping for different results.

#2 Businesses don’t even know what they know

The weight of data businesses now own is quite staggering.?By 2025 the world will be producing 180 zettabytes of data a year.

A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.

“To put it into perspective, if all the movies ever made were converted into digital files and stored in 1 TB drives, it would take about 4 million TB drives to store them all—which would be equivalent to 4 Petabytes. That still doesn’t even come close to a zettabyte—it would take around 4 billion TB drives! To put that into even further perspective, it would take over 117 million years for someone to watch every single movie ever made at 2 hours per movie without taking any breaks whatsoever.”[1]

In other words it’s the mother load of information.

When data became accessible to businesses, it felt like we had arrived in a new era of knowledge and wisdom.?More data = better decisions.

Data gathering could help us make micro decisions on a mass scale.?Ensuring that we could target audiences effectively, serve them content with brilliant precision, predict each move of the people buying our goods, create products & services perfectly suited to their every need.

Oh and by the way, all this can be done at the flick of a switch and so you need half your team to deliver it, or maybe even no team at all?

Market research was invented to fill the gaps of knowledge that business had around the people that bought their products and services.?But big data has promised to fill that gap and in fact all the other gaps you didn’t even know existed.

And if you look at the amount of data being gathered, it would seem that businesses have shit their pants with excitement. It’s like a kid being let loose in a candy store and giving themself diabetes with all the sugar they have ingested.

Like the house of Liberace, businesses have taken a rather maximalist approach to the whole data situation.

As Tricia Wang said so astutely in her TED talk on the human insights missing from big data “73% of big data projects aren’t profitable”[2].

As it turns out having more data is not helping us make better decisions in business.

In fact as she goes on to say, in many instances data has the complete opposite effect:

“Relying on data alone, increases the chance that we will miss something whilst giving the illusion that we know everything.” [3]

This is problematic for so many reasons. Here are 4:

1.????We are in the era of spaceship brands. Opportunities are being lost, errors made by focusing on an enormously zoomed out view of the world that misses a crucial human story to help make sense of the narrative.

2.????Data does not equal insight. Data is just another piece of stimulus, another information type that requires analysis in order to turn it into an insight.?If departments have already been hollowed out by the automated nature of data gathering, then who the hell is doing the analysis and management?

3.????Data doesn’t present itself, doesn’t communicate itself to the board, doesn’t motivate an organisation to get behind it.

4.????Endless data gathering is not good sustainable business. Making the most of what you have is a real art, but one that creates a strong positive narrative. For research not to feel like a cost but a real value driver to c-suite level executives, demonstrating the effectiveness of the work we all do is essential.

One of the fastest growing project types for us is not conducting research anymore, but auditing what clients already own.

There is a palpable moment of relief visible in the eyes of your client when you say you can sift through the 68 documents they already own and help make sense of where they are, before embarking on a new project.

In an era when you can gather data on absolutely everything, it makes sense to me that we need to stop.?Not because we want to know less, but because we want to make use of what we have.?To learn about the things in front of us in great detail. To make known to us the known unknowns and the known knowns.

The military have a process for this.?It’s called the OODA cycle. It was developed by Colonel John Boyd in the United States Airforce.

In the theatre of war your very life depends on agile decision making.

If you overlay in the world of business we can see that many businesses are caught up in bad decision making, largely because they fail to make decisions at all.?Businesses get caught in a tailspin of data collection and spend far too little time doing anything with that information.?

If you spend all your time gathering more intelligence on the battlefield without taking action you will most likely be killed.

Colonel John Boyd’s principle was this: spend as much time decision making and acting as you do gathering intelligence.

This is OODA.

Observation

Orientation

Decision making

Action

50% of time is spent on observation and orientation, 50% on decision making and action.?

You will never know all the things there are to know, so make use of what you have and act accordingly.

I think the same is true in business.?50% of time gathering, 50% of time acting.

Ain't that the truth. Know when enough is enough.

?

[1] https://mrdtechnologies.co.uk/zettabyte/

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/tricia_wang_the_human_insights_missing_from_big_data?language=en

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/tricia_wang_the_human_insights_missing_from_big_data?language=en