{"id":9419,"date":"2013-04-04T01:30:17","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T01:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/?p=9419"},"modified":"2019-10-06T06:34:40","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T10:34:40","slug":"analytics-and-emotion-why-storytelling-may-be-the-best-friend-of-data-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/analytics-and-emotion-why-storytelling-may-be-the-best-friend-of-data-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Analytics and emotion: Why storytelling may be the best friend of data science"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_9422\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-9422\" class=\"wp-image-9422 size-medium\" title=\"Data Trust\" src=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Data-Trust-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"Analytics and emotion: Why storytelling may be the best friend of data science\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-9422\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Data Trust<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Many of us would like to believe that we base our important business decisions on well grounded facts.\u00a0 It does not take much looking around to realise that the data do not necessarily support the decisions being made.\u00a0 David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/02\/19\/opinion\/brooks-what-data-cant-do.html?_r=0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">What Data Can\u2019t Do<\/a>\u201d that outlines five areas data science struggles with.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Data struggles with context \u2013 that data is bad at narrative and emergent thinking<\/li>\n<li>Data creates bigger haystacks \u2013 that we gather more and more findings as the data gets bigger but most of these are spurious<\/li>\n<li>Big data has trouble with big problems \u2013 that few are convinced to come to an answer by analytics on the big questions of life and society<\/li>\n<li>Data favours memes over masterpieces \u2013 That data finds it much more difficult to spot specialness before it becomes popular<\/li>\n<li>Data obscures values \u2013 that data is gather and structured according to a researcher\u2019s worldview of the problem<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Nevertheless, decision sciences are all about data.\u00a0 GilPress in \u201cA <a href=\"http:\/\/whatsthebigdata.com\/2012\/04\/26\/a-very-short-history-of-data-science\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Very Short History of Data Science<\/a>\u201d states that data science emerged as a discipline in 1974 when Peter Naur stated that it is \u201cThe science of dealing with data, once they have been established, while the relation of the data to what they represent is delegated to other fields and sciences.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There has never really been a shortage of data for companies to analyse but there have been limitations to what could be accomplished by reasonable computing power that businesses had at their disposal.\u00a0\u00a0 According to some sources, the volume of data captured is almost doubling every year. This is the world of big data where the issue is that the volume of data is so large that regular statistical packages and even regular statistics need to be adjusted.\u00a0 This issue is being addressed by data science which according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drewconway.com\/zia\/?p=2378\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Drew Conway<\/a> is the confluence of three areas: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise. See his blog for his explanations of these three skills.<\/p>\n<p>Brooks states that \u201cdata can be used to make sense of mind-bogglingly complex situations. Data can help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuitions and can help reduce the extent to which our desires distort our perceptions.\u201d\u00a0 Data science will not, of course, answer everything to the satisfaction of business leaders all the time.\u00a0 This is especially true of the big strategic questions.\u00a0 In the commercial arena where executives are looking for an edge in their decision making, analytics is a useful must-have tool but ultimately it will never provide the complete picture on the big questions.<\/p>\n<p>While data science, big data and all that moves forward, there is another more qualitative factor that also needs to be addressed in order for business leaders to make use of all that data science has to offer.\u00a0 I call it an emotional overlay.\u00a0 As Brooks states, \u201cCommerce depends on trust. Trust is reciprocity coated by emotion. People and companies that behave well in tough times earn affection and self-respect that is extremely valuable, even if it is hard to capture in data.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Emotional-Overlay.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-9423 size-medium\" title=\"Emotional Overlay\" src=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Emotional-Overlay-300x216.png\" alt=\"Emotional Overlay\" width=\"300\" height=\"216\" \/><\/a>Trust is built on the back of our perceptions and emotions in a situation, environment or relationship.\u00a0 Our perceptions and emotions are a vital part of the decision making process and no amount of analytics will or should eliminate these completely.\u00a0 Thus, I add a perceptual\/ emotional overlay to Drew Conway\u2019s data science Venn diagram as it relates to management decision making. That overlay may help explain why certain mathematically robust data insights are accepted in the decision making process and others not.<\/p>\n<p>What is a possible antidote for the emotional overlay that may sometimes cloud the robust computationally accurate findings of data science?\u00a0 Storytelling.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Infographics are headed in this direction but storytelling in its full glory allows analytics to come alive in an emotional context that matters to decision makers.\u00a0 In the end, we never escape the full experience which includes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/customer-experience\/rational-experience\">rational<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/customer-experience\/the-emotional-experience\">emotional<\/a> parts even when the experience is analytics and data science itself.<\/p>\n<table style=\"background-color: #dfdddd;\" border=\"0\" width=\"100%\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"padding-right: 20px; text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/about-us\/team\/qaalfa-dibeehi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Qaalfa\u00a0Dibeehi<\/a>\u00a0is Chief Operating and Consulting Officer\u00a0at\u00a0of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Beyond Philosophy<\/a>\u00a0one of the world\u2019s first organizations devoted to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.beyondphilosophy.com\/customer-experience\/what-is-customer-experience\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">customer experience<\/a>.\u00a0Qaalfa\u00a0is an international co-author of <a href=\"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/customer-experience\/\">Customer Experience<\/a>: Future Trends and Insights. Beyond Philosophy provide consulting,\u00a0specialised\u00a0research &amp; training from offices in Atlanta, Georgia and London, England.<br \/>\n<span style=\"line-height: 19px;\"><br \/>\nFollow Qaalfa Dibeehi on Twitter<strong>\u00a0@Qaalfa_BeyondP<\/strong><br \/>\n<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of us would like to believe that we base our important business decisions on well grounded facts.\u00a0 It does not take much looking around to realise that the data do not necessarily support the decisions being made.\u00a0 David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times, \u201cWhat Data Can\u2019t Do\u201d that outlines [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[271],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-emotional-experience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondphilosophy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}