Data might give us information fast, but for quick but profound decisions, intuition is much better. Prasad Kaipa and Navi Radjou, in a recent book, urge business leaders to move “from smart to wise.” They have a point. Smart organizations and leaders thrive on constant feedback. Smart is fast. Wise, however, is slow. Wise organizations and leaders need time and take it.
Big Data is (too) obvious. “You can only manage what you measure”—really? The financial crisis has shown that we manage poorly what we measure. And failed mergers, failed product launches, reputational crises, and social media disasters, indicate that we need to get better at managing what we cannot measure.
Leaders need to have “opposable minds,” as design thinker Roger Martin puts it. The business leader of the 21st century will no longer be judged by how much uncertainty he or she can eliminate but by how much uncertainty he or she can tolerate.
Big Data doesn’t give (or forgive). Data might be able to predict new problems or find new solutions to existing problems, but only human intuition and ingenuity can come up with groundbreaking new ideas. That is a uniquely human gift—one that goes beyond merely fixing a problem or meeting a functional need.
By the same token, if we quantify all of our relationships, we will not leave any wiggle room for human discretion. Because we often have mixed feelings about people and their behavior, our judgment can be more than just binary. This means we can assess and respond to ambivalent behaviors with more nuance, and we can choose to accept failure as a prerequisite of innovation.It is hard to see how we can make progress towards any goal without an ability to forgive.
Let’s resist the rush to data and take the time to lean back so we can be fast when it matters. Let’s grant ourselves a data moratorium from time to time that we can use to reflect on what really is important. Let’s use data to tell our stories, but let’s not allow data become our only story.
作者: Tim Leberecht 译者：严匡正