Is over reliance on “Data” and “Metrics” justified ?
Samarth Gupta
Technical Solutions Manager, Industrial Design and Visualisation for India, ASEAN & ANZ at Autodesk
There is definitely power in figures & numbers as they provide substantially more information to its sponsors about their businesses. They provide a bedrock to devise strategies as well as give form and shape to its success. Strategy can be abstract & subjective but to measure its success, numbers are needed to represent it to make it more comprehensible, be it for making a business more successful, or winning elections or a football competition or measuring customer delight. But many a times, data driven approaches might not be enough to achieve desired outcomes. Businesses can easily lose sight of the strategy and focus strictly on the metrics meant to represent its success. Furthermore, raw data could be easily rigged or manipulated to align to stakeholder demands or feed wokeism. Let us examine some popular stories in different areas to further delve into this.
A. ?Corporations
In the corporate world, I mainly see organizations relying solely on data for decision making rather than also relying on their instincts. Often, they are more comfortable analyzing excel sheets and reports to predict future scenarios or forecast firms’ revenue numbers. But the downside of adopting this strategy is that it completely ignores various factors disrupting the industry & businesses like climate change, advancements in technology, societal changes, geo-political situation and probably many more.
For instance, sustainability has recently entered the corporate lexicon and organizations generally tie their business goals to sustainability. But I reckon it is used and projected very “loosely”, largely its impact measured by various metrics to name a few environmental, financial, governance to measure progress & track goals. But in the end, it remains ambiguous to customers as they fail to utilize this data to make informed choices. For example, some airlines include the CO2 emission figures next to the flight no when travelers print their travel itinerary. Such numbers might demonstrate the commitment of an airline to sustainability, but it remains incomprehensible to an ordinary passenger who would be concerned with the availability of other travel details on the itinerary. Such hefty claims could be projected in a much simpler & creative manner to bring more clarity to passengers and ultimately build brand value.
?A gross misinterpretation of overreliance on data in the corporate world is during its annual employee appraisals. Though most organizations employ an ostensibly transparent process, many fail to accurately map the actual performance of employees to the measurement yardstick chosen for them. This can be explained by an organization’s obsession with excel sheets, reports & dashboards which eventually are used to measure employees’ annual performance and their long-term career growth. It may not capture an employees’ subjective qualities like his passion quotient, his judgement skills in convivial or hostile scenarios, his appetite to take risks and above all his in-depth knowledge in diverse areas and how it helped in business growth. This is because most measurement processes rely on convenient tools which process raw data through various algorithms which are ultimately controlled by the organization.
An analogy could be to assume that an autonomous car would make the roads 100% safe as it is controlled by data driven algorithms. But in spite of all the noise and hype created around the autonomous driving technology, it is still NOT mainstream. And to my mind it is so because it is a grueling task for a machine to capture all the possible road scenarios which guarantees 100% safety to everyone on the road. Also, there cannot be fixed parameters for how to quantify safety ie define how “Safe” is considered safe enough to put a self-driving car on the road. To put this another way, computers installed in a self-driving car may be less likely to make errors in the first place avoiding situations like rear-ending, but also less capable than humans in judgement levels if something untoward suddenly happens. The upshot is, it might not be entirely possible ( based on my limited knowledge )?to embed a human mind into a machine readable value that result in a purely driverless experience.
?The corporate world is riddled with such examples where many organizations define the purpose of their businesses before striving for revenue or profit numbers. Tata’s vision as a conglomerate isn’t limited to grow their revenue numbers but to participate in our nation’s growth. Which is why they established TATA Trusts ( ^1?) just after 25 years of the group’s inception as they wanted to earn and also give back a part of those earnings to society. In fact, the Taj Hotel at Mumbai was the result of Tata’s vision to provide Hotel access to Indians when our country was still under the British Rule. Yes, Tata is a corporate, they run businesses from salt to steel, but at the heart of it is its vision to give back to society. Which is why the social media account of Tata Trust does genuine good in terms of inspiring people and also making them participate in doing social good. It is not at all at the mercy of petty likes, thumbs ups or retweets by its followers as this will ultimately going to be the residue of their strong mission and their noble intentions.
Can their contribution to our nation be measured by any yardstick? Can the basic principles of brand elasticity be applied to calculate the price vs profit equation? ?I do not think so. Because in businesses certain attributes would always remain intangible and to my mind can never be represented accurately by an elaborate set of figures.
?B. Cinema
Even the field of performing arts has always been mired in the perennial ‘Qualitative versus Quantitative’ debate .
Take the example of hindi cinema of yesteryear. Back in the day , various elements of a movie like characters, dialogues and music were aimed to advance the social narrative and weren’t there merely for entertainment. Music for example was an inseparable part of the storyline without which the whole plot could get compromised. Why was it so ? I reckon films were considered as “Art Forms” meant not only to entertain the audience but also to highlight social issues prevalent at the time in the society. A case in point could be the 1957 Hindi classic Pyaasa ( ^2?) directed , produced & acted by the legendary Guru Dutt. It is to this day considered as one of the greatest Hindi film ever made perhaps due to its unconventional theme, bold representation of its lead characters , and its audacious overtones. Pyaasa captures the protagonist’s anguish at the hypocrisy and naked opportunism of the modern world that has no leaning or interest to appreciate his invaluable poetry. The way melody and poetry were used as an effective tool to highlight human psyche and materialism were not only outright brilliant but enough to dazzle the audience with its audacious depiction of society in a newly independent nation. In fact one of its songs "Jinhen Naaz Hai Hind Par" which brutally narrates and accurately represent the deplorable condition of the society was so thought provoking and impactful that it was banned by the then rulers of India. Though the film was jettisoned as anti-government it could still enjoy commercial success at the box office . It also remains as one of the few films in Indian cinema which could blend the artistic flare with commercial success and its uniqueness remains an inspiration to many associated with the craft even today.
Does the fact that “Pyaasa” never won a Filmfare award despite its commercial success belittles its cinematic brilliance and its global cult following ? Does the quantitative aspects of the film ( other than its gross collection ) outweigh its qualitative aspects ? Is it possible for the movie fraternity to create a template involving all the plausible ingredients for future commercial success(s) ?of any film?
I reckon its pointless to believe that the richness and depth of any craft ( cinema in this case) can be measured in pure numbers. These and many such masterpieces of Indian cinema cannot remain at the mercy of industry felicitation or their commercial success . In todays parlance the perceived success on social media platforms can join the list .?
I remember during one TV program when this famous Bollywood actor bluntly replied to a question as to why he never won a Filmfare award?in spite of his various scintillating on-screen performances and his undeniable contributions to Indian cinema. His response was brutally honest but also sums up the subjective and convenient nature of how success gets measured, how metrics and popularity are deeply intertwined, how easy it is to manipulate the yardstick which measures someone’s achievements! The actor might not have won any awards but perhaps he has already won the hearts of millions of his admirers
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C. Football
The data obsession sadly has also creeped into sports, and when the sport is the beautiful game of football it certainly affects millions of people.
I remember as a young fan of the sport, I would enjoy the sheer movement of the ball across the pitch , the way players would scramble for control and possession?and the simplicity of the way?the game was played. There were no fancy graphics, no dashboards, no one capturing the kms covered by each player , no unfathomable heat maps. And yet we would look forward to the game of football like a lifetime event, something that cannot be missed by any mile.
Diego Maradona’s goals against England in 1986 semifinals would always be remembered as one of the BEST as well as the most controversial goals in the history of football . The famous ‘Hand of Goal’ as popularly known to the football connoisseurs and lovers has remained one of the highly debated events and has been critiqued exhaustively?. The second goal which the master player scored singlehandedly taking the ball through the midfield , dodging it, injecting substantive guile to mislead the defenders and?eventually silencing his detractors by putting it in the back of the net.?In today’s corporate world, the statisticians would merely try to capture the quantitative aspects like no of tackles, distance covered, ball speed etc to report this goal scored by Diego Maradona, an Argentinian forward?which helped it secure a place in the Finals against West Germany ( Before the unification of Germany ) . The limitation in the statistic would be to?capture the craft, the technique, the trickery,cpure brilliance of the South American legend and above all the unbridled joy it gave to millions of football fans around the globe .
What the mathematicians and statisticians fail to understand that the beautiful game of football is still so popular due to its simplicity and the fact that it has a emotional side and not because of the intervention by technology alone. If football is all about scoring goals than the idea of enjoying the beautiful game is simply negated & undermined. It cannot be about science of numbers alone, about the content analytics which makes teams win or lose. This though has been exacerbated by the use of advanced digital tools and complex algorithms to further post mortem the game and more alarmingly the performance of the players. When science monitors each and every move of the players on the pitch, they can inadvertently get conscious of the technology capturing their movement rather than play naturally and use their instincts on the field.
Have we in reality injected too much of metrics into the game which has in fact negatively impacted it , the players and support staff and above all taken the fun out of the whole equation?
On the contrary, I reckon football particularly played during the world cup tournament is very special and enjoyed more as it is a reflection of a team’s culture, their civilizational history and above all their national grand narrative. For example, Spain would like to keep possession whereas Japan would surprise everyone with its never say die attitude on the pitch. Germans would play a more technical game while Serbia would play a more physical game enough to rattle their opponents on the pitch. Such amalgamations of different styles, techniques, culture makes football a beautiful game loved by many, revered by many, worshipped by many and rightly so.
This is the football season; the world cup is in progress as I write this piece. But amidst experiencing the joy akin to the festive spirit, I see this perennial obsession of the organizers & broadcasters with numbers. In reality numerous occasions during this World cup have proved that crunching numbers do not always result in projected outcomes. Take for example the last league match between Japan & Spain in Group E. Though Spain controlled much of the ball during the entire 90+ minutes of the game, and dominated almost 80% of the possession , it was Japan who won the match 2-1 . Football experts and Television presenters merely parroted the data made available to them by the broadcasters but they simply misread the tea leaves. This was because there was no available data which could measure Japan’s resilience, its grit and its indomitable spirit to compete. And this wasn’t the only case when the predictions of these so called experts and connoisseurs went wrong in this very World Cup. Who’d have thought that a Maghreb Arab country would become the first Arab-African team to reach the semis of the World cup. This to my mind happened as most of the predictions were made on the basis of historical data and figures which do not always accurately represent and place things in the right perspective.
Conclusion
Data & metrics are no doubt important to devise and measure strategy but it must be complemented by human instincts. We have seen over reliance on Data & Metrics resulting in knowledge gaps & lack of judgement during elections, during performance appraisals, while reporting out sales figures, in sports and in many more areas.
Since data is always “backward looking”, any attempt to plainly extrapolate it to a wishful outcome will be considered to satisfy the confirmation bias of stakeholders and feed the omnipresent populism. On the other hand, data loaded with contextual details and nuances which depicts accurate information would always be valued over glorified figures , convenient numbers and future condescension to make everyone happy .
After all there is a difference between ‘data’ and ‘content’ !
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Notes & Further Reading