Decisions Over Decimals

CHAPTER 4Learning to Become a Fierce Data Interrogator

Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.

— Ronald Coase

Now that we've discussed how to align our focus on the essential question in Chapters 1–3, it is time to move to the second pillar of Quantitative Intuition (QI)™: data contextualization. It is the stage in which we collect, clean, and scrutinize the data to uncover answers to the questions that we have so carefully posed. This is where the Q in QI will take the lead, but even in this stage, intuition, judgment, and a great deal of skepticism will be essential.

This is also the stage where you may be thinking, “analytics is not my strong suit, so I will leave it to the ‘quants’”—those with a degree in engineering, math, economics or data science, or the Excel or even Python experts. There are skills needed to scrutinize data, but being strong in math is rarely one of them. It is about having context. It is often the manager with deep understanding of the business who is in the best position to evaluate the context of the problem or decision at hand, and the manager, therefore, who is best equipped to probe the data, not necessarily from a statistical point of view, but through a series of critical questions. This kind of interrogation can determine whether you have the right data to address the essential question and assess the soundness of the results and recommendations. This interrogative mindset requires a great deal of intuition and business acumen. ...