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What is it about the term "Data-driven" that is so divisive? Trying to explain this to someone, but coming up short.

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I suspect most people (myself included, for the majority of my life) have not worked in an environment where there is a healthy respect for and use of data. Most orgs aren’t data driven. After awhile folk start to believe it’s not possible, and they cite the McNamara fallacy.

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I have seen manipulative leaders bully people with data lies e.g., after an eng. spent a month instrumenting something, their first broken draft report was used in a big argument between managers to hurt the team who would own the stat collection _everyone_ abandoned it 🚨☣️

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Oh wow, this is totally one failure mode I didn’t consider in my initial tweet. Another one: a metrics owner argues that the metrics are right and anecdotal reports are wrong, and then 6 months later everyone finds out they were measuring wrong. Result: everyone is scarred.

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Another one: after tying some set of metrics to promotion/perf criteria, the entire org begins to massage the data to make that metric look good. Amazon has an independent auditing function, run by their finance department, to prevent exactly this behaviour.

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Ok so I’m updating rapidly to — using data in a healthy manner is akin to nuclear power: super powerful, but if you implement it badly it blows up in your face.

1:43 AM · Sep 3, 2022Twitter Web App

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yeah and it’s critical to be in an environment where _feelings_ and _intuitions_ are valued and considered statistical decision making cannot just be the tool of logic-worshipping feeling-deniers (you know the type)