Act 1: How the research business was seduced by the arithmocracy
No one in business has enough time. Buyers of research are deluged by presentations, with Big Data promising more data and even more material to ingest. Clients and suppliers alike try to keep their heads above the data deluge in a DRIP world, that is Data Rich but Insight Poor.
The industries that are responsible for generating information, knowledge and insight are still churning out what I call Data Freighters, supertankers of often undigested and indigestible material, a fact which we all instinctively know is compounding the problem for the precious but over-taxed attentional resources of ever-demanding clients.
How did we allow this to happen?
A large part of the problem is attributable to what I call the “arithmocracy”: a system based on the worship of numbers-as-gods and an unshakeable, if unproven, belief in safety in numbers.
We see it encroaching across much of our lives: school league tables, goals for health system waiting times and police crime rate targets to mention a few, and in our world, we see it in the ceaseless onslaught of ubiquitous and tyrannical metrics, which dehumanise as much as enlighten.
We have become enslaved to a form of marketing-as-science known as “physics envy”, the belief that humans are like atoms: predictable, controllable and susceptible to solely mathematical analysis and arid, rational and scientistic presentation. It is as if we are guided by the spirit of Dickens’ Gradgrind from “Hard Times”.
“Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”
Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.
The deep-seated fear that “somewhere there is more data I could have examined before I made that decision” is something that needs to be resisted.
The research industry hasn’t got to grips with the fact that it should frame itself as part of The Communications, Ideas and Creativity Business rather than in the ‘data collection and transmission’ industry.
So, my first diagnosis is that instead of aspiring to the wrong forms of sciences – mathematics, economics and physics – it needs to accept that it is at the heart of the persuasion and influence industry and therefore needs to look to biology, psychology and complexity and abandon its worship of arid rationalism.
Act 2: From Information to Insight
As a long-term provider myself, I believe insight remains the prime currency of our business. Information (or data) is merely fuel for the Insightment engine. Insightment depends on the ability to perceive new and unexpected connections.
My favoured distinction is this: information is to be collected, insight is to be connected.
As a card-carrying member of the Worshipful Tribe of Behavioural Economists, I want to advise the research industry and their clients that human behaviour does not follow the reductionist principles of information processing.
Instead, BE shows us (reminds us, really) that humans are not rational information processors. As various governments have recently discovered, telling people doesn’t work because human beings do not merely receive transmitted information and act accordingly (anyone have children?).
The research world – clients and “suppliers” (another word freighted with pejorative weight) – needs to grasp that it is in the business of constructing and delivering meaning. And I am a firm believer that when it comes to human communication, meaning beats truth: so, researchers need to be less frightened of the nightmare of imprecision and more attuned to unearthing and sharing universal human truths, insight and imagination that together create actionable meaning.
Act 3: Tips for Restory-ing Research
If numbers numb us, stories stir us.
Stories translate information into emotion. Stories are patterns with meaning that the brain is naturally hard-wired to respond to, whether we are aware of it or not.
Neurochemically, there is even evidence that stories make us care, create empathy and build trust by generating oxytocin, a molecule associated with human bonding and empathy.
Here are a few thoughts to ponder:
- Story breaches the defences of information and circumvents the tendency of material to get remaindered in “attention spam”. Create a story and you are less likely to be consigned to oblivion.
- If stories are patterns with meaning, and the brain values pattern, make sure your presentations have a sense of deep structure and coherence. This is what I call finding your Golden Thread: it may be the journey to and from your central insight, or an argument or angle you are sustaining but ensure that there is a structure, skeleton or path for the brain to hold onto, rather than just “one damn chart after another”.
- We are designed by evolution to respond to surprise. One of the “Big 6” emotions, surprise is so important as it alerts us to what is evolutionarily relevant rather than what is just more of the same. Prioritise what will be emotionally surprising, as that will be more likely be meaningfully memorable to your audience. Move before you prove.
- Massage Don’t Message: our business is obsessed with messages, and all the rational, didactic baggage that carries. Far better to approach it from the point of view of personal meaning and understand how to massage the self-worth and impression management of your audience: what will make them feel good about themselves, their role, their outcomes?
- The “research” world is equally obsessed with content: how about we pay a bit more attention to form? Not to downplay the importance of what we say, but to upweight how we say it.
- One final reminder: no one ever left a meeting saying, ‘I wish there’d been more slides.’
2 comments
Hi- thanks for the comments.
Know a bit about Heidegger but much of the anti-intellectualism at work in the comms/brand/research world would render him verboten (as it were).
I also think there is much to learn from the ancients (rhetoric, philosophy and story) as much as from recent thinkers.
I agree we need a new quasi-Darwinian synthesis: BE, complexity theory, storytelling, social psychology and what I call “insightment”…
Tas
Thank your for your important article. As a researcher, I couldn’t agree more. Of course there was a time when there was a dire lack of data/information and when decisions relied on “gut feelings” or “best guesses.” With the advent of the internet allowing massive highly personal data collection at reduced costs there has come the tidal wave build up of terabytes of cresting waves of data without the accompanying training or tools for how to “connect” it. For a long time it was fantastic just to have the data and make some inferences from it. Now, as you point out, we have to find ways of getting our arms around it and making greater sense of it, because the audiences that need to understand the insights are not data scientists, but are social (and of course commercial) decision makers who need valid guides to policies and practices. I do believe data is better than no data in general, but data is always in need of interpretation. And when it comes to interpretation, not all interpretations are equal. So what makes for a more valid interpretation becomes critically central. And then there is the presentation, all valid points you make, great job.
On the point about “rational man” economics vs BE, it was only through using data surveying and correlations that Kahneman discovered his many insights, many of which almost anyone who was on the outside of economics profession “central paradigm” could have told economists had they asked: namely, man is not rational. Economists could have asked any human. I am being facetious, obviously, but they never doubted their central thesis. Kahneman is not a genius, he just simply saw an easy way to test his hypotheses–by asking humans, thus disrupting a core proposition of economics. But while Kahneman and BE can be credited with at least undoing a truly bad, bad premise, it only offers survey research and good interpretation of the results as the answer to economic theory. No strands that connect it all, just disruption, it seems. This is a good first step, and hopefully it will lead to productive and more predictable outcomes for economics.
I would like to suggest to Kahneman and BE that they read the German philosopher Martin Heidegger if they want to see any further into what being human is. I think Heidegger offers something that is as close to a deep understanding of being human as we have, but this takes another lifetime for a professional involved in a special profession. But it might also be a way of gaining deeper insight into all of the premises behind the social sciences (and indeed science itself, because science is also a human activity). Heidegger has made remarkable impacts on philosophy, psychotherapy, psychology, sociology, history, literature, postmodern thought and other fields.
His “story” pulls all of being human together in a connected way. It is a tough slug to get into Heidegger, but it is a remarkable picture he draws that I think relates deeply to what Kahneman calls fast and slow thinking.
Thanks for your thoughts above, your good thinking, and your indulgence in my long missle.
Larry Wilson, El Dorado Hills, California