Comfort Data

There is a real allure to metrics. Numbers have a sort of reassuring quality, as if they float above all the opinions and agendas and uncertainty in the world. It makes sense, they're easy targets for resting your opinions on, and being unsure is uncomfortable. This is all amplified by the corporate environment, where confidence and the ability to persuade people is rewarded.

Don't get me wrong, I think analytics are important. Information is necessary for making decisions and sometimes analytics is the only way to get that information. It stands to reason that the more sophisticated your analytics, the more complete information you can gather. And with more complete information, better decisions can be made.

What's exhausting is that this doesn't seem to pan out in practice. I have two observations to this point.

Illusion of Simplicity

I've observed (and experienced, I'm not innocent) a temptation to view numerical metrics as somehow intrinsically better than other measures. It's as if numbers, simply by being numbers, are more immune to spin, bias, and the general imprecision of language.

In some contexts this is true. If you're solving a quadratic equation then the solutions you find are either right or wrong, according to the rules of algebra.

The problem I see is that analytics, by mere association with, say, statistics, has picked up the "flavor" of rigor, without any of its substance. The mere presence of numbers and charts clouds the fact that analytics can be spun, biased, and downright manipulated by people and their agendas. Changing the presentation of a chart or "conveniently omitting" a particular detail can influence people to interpret data in ways they otherwise wouldn't have.

I have personally sat through dozens of hours of meetings about how a particular metric should be interpreted. I've watched as hundreds of dollars of salary have been burned by people arguing over an internal metric that almost no one liked and never produced real value. Yet, this metric has stubbornly persisted for years only because no one has been willing to sign off on deleting it.

Ornamental Analytics

This brings me to my second observation, which is that it's often tempting to have analytics even if you don't use the information for anything. Or, in some cases, people hold on to a metric even when it's more harm than good. I call this "ornamental analytics" because at best, all the charts do is sit there and look pretty.

I really wish I knew why this happens. Then again, if I knew why people continue doing things that are unhealthy, and could convince them to stop, I'd write a self-help book and retire early. My working theory is that metrics help people feel in control, even when they're unreliable, lacking a clear interpretation, or just plain wrong. Trying to take a way a metric, even when people can't articulate what value it's bringing them, can feel like a threat because it attacks their sense of control.

Sometimes analytics serves the same purpose as home decor. It's there because people like it and it makes them feel good. Of course, since we're good Enlightened Empiricists, we're going to pretend like our emotions don't play into our decisions and come up with alternative rationalizations for what we want at work. I believe the smart branding for this is being "data driven".

It's All Made Up Anyway

I'm sure there's some interesting sociology about the corporate subculture, with all its tired jargon and complicated expectations. But above all I'm taken aback by how we act like corporate work is not completely bizarre. I suspect I'm the weird one for having some reservations about the workplace's social script, but the fact that we're alive at all is strange enough, and we're on a video call talking about analytics data? It all feels very shallow and very derivative. The human animal does not seem meant for this.

No, the human animal is not meant for this, and honestly that's reason enough to just let people have their numbers.