Make it stand out
‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’
John Maynard Keynes
We are coming up to forty years since the launch of Microsoft Excel. At first it came packaged in with tools that we really wanted, Word and maybe Power Point. Then in the 1990s, we worked out what to do with it to boost reports on sales and progress. Many people still carry the idea with them that the data is the last step in the project - the definitive answer to what is happening or whether our work was successful. Once you start working with numbers in a more exploratory way, an unsettling truth appears. Often, data just shows us what we don’t yet know and what we haven’t learnt to measure.
Getting to the truth of it all
Trying to stay the same while the world shifts around you comes with a price too.
CONTENT THIS QUARTER
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The Calm in Chaos
What if our science lessons at school got many things wrong? That is the proposal of chaos theory. While a simple cause and effect model of the world is reassuring, it’s also unrealistic. We live in a dynamic world defined by random events. Chaos theory is a theory of why making sense of the world is so hard, but also how to begin that journey.
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The Hidden Problem
Data is almost always scrappy and incomplete. At any one time, we want to understand the big picture and the main trends, but so much is usually missing in what we can capture. Once we understand the data cycle, we can bring out the best in human and machine thinking.
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A Skewed Perspective
Data seems so neutral an objective - at least that is what our science teachers told us. But when data is gathered in a social context, it bears little in common with scientific observation in a laboratory. Social data gets its meaning from its context, and that is something we need humans to supply.
