Minds and Machines

In today’s business world, decisions are based on numbers. This probably sounds like a good thing. My experience is somewhat different. That’s why I’d like to share with you some truths about numbers.

1. Numbers remove detail, irrelevant how detailed they are.

   Numbers are an abstraction. Abstraction means you remove detail. You can’t restore all details by just providing more numbers. More detail doesn’t simply mean more numbers! Numbers remove all those things that can’t be put into numbers: people, their feelings, their opinions. And aren’t these the really important things after all?

   You’re always up to your own interpretation of these numbers. With other people’s opinions removed, you’re essentially drawing your own picture. You might use the same colors, but you’re certainly going to create your very own piece of art.

2. Numbers always tell about the past, never about the future.

   Reports, statistics, business cases. Some numbers obviously like to tell you something about the future. The truth is simple: they can’t.

   Numbers are created from experience. Experience from the past. And whenever they appear with a time-stamp from the future, they essentially are based on the simple assumption that things which happened in a certain way in the past are going to happen in exactly the same way in the future.

   This plain assumption is often obfuscated with factors, probabilities and even more numbers. This makes the whole thing look a lot more complex. But it doesn’t make the whole thing more or less true. Mathematically or statistically projecting numbers from the past into the future doesn’t remove any uncertainty about the future.

   Hardly anyone calls this technique by its proper name: predicting the future. Face the facts: this is exactly the same business fortune-tellers are in. It’s just the manager-compatible business flavor.

3. Numbers offer a feeling of correctness, not correctness itself.

   Numbers successfully managed to become the manifestation of correctness. Numbers are considered pure facts, plain truth. If you can just offer some numbers to ponder with, you’re already going to convince 97% of your audience. It isn’t even that important, where your numbers come from, if your numbers are only loosely connected to the subject, or even not at all.

   You’d like to know what research I got the 97% from? Welcome to the other 3%!

So why do we need numbers?

People don’t really need numbers for their decisions. Decisions are emotional: Either you’re emotionally involved – so your opinion is more likely to be based on your feelings than on numbers. Or you’re not involved, which would make you a great factual decision maker. But if you’re not involved, why should you decide? You’re certainly going to let others decide. Others more involved…

Now what remains as the perfect use case for numbers after all?

Justification.

Numbers are the perfect weapon for justification. You can use them to make people believe why your idea is a good one. Or why someone else’s idea is a bad one. And that’s what numbers are used for.

Eventually some people are going to realize that and start putting their resources into something more valuable than justifications.

Conclusion.

Handle numbers with care! They’re not even close to efficient communication because they offer a lot of space for (mis)interpretation (1). For predictions they’re as helpful as a crystal ball on your desk (2) and even if they appear to be correct, they needn’t be (3).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 21:44 and is filed under Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.