Recently a client was walking me through a presentation. The presentation was trying to build a case for the impact that one of his programs had on the business. When he got to the slide that had the key data to make his case, I had a strong negative reaction. At first, I couldn’t explain it. The data seemed to make sense. It supported his point quite well. Yet, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that I had. After we finished, I continued thinking about the slide.
Why did I have such a negative response? As I reviewed it again, I noticed something. My client had worked with an outside consulting company on the analysis. The company placed their logo in the bottom left corner of the slide. I felt a pit in my stomach again. That was it!
Just a couple of weeks before, I was working with a different client and a consultant from that same measurement company. The meeting did not go well. I found their techniques and conclusions questionable. I also found the consultant from the company to be very arrogant and combative.
The mere presence of their logo had more of an impact on me than the data itself. Yet in the moment, I didn’t even know I was reacting to the logo. I didn’t even remember seeing it. Could I have been better at “filtering” the data? Probably not. The logo data was registering and being used in the unconscious part of my brain. It’s hard to filter something of which you are unaware. It turns out, I’m not the only one who experiences this.
Dan Ariely shares a similar story in his new book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone. Ariely ran an experiment to look into the impact of “hidden in plain sight” (my term, not his) data. In the first phase of the experiment, he showed pictures of works of art to students and asked them to rate them. The pictures came from different galleries and contained the logo of the gallery. The students received a stipend for participating in the experiment. This first round provided Ariely with a baseline for student attitudes about the artwork. He then re-ran the experiment. However, this time he told the students that one of the galleries was funding the experiment and was paying their stipend. Student ratings of the paintings with the funding galley’s logo increased compared to the baseline. In fact, in later experiments, as Ariely raised the amount of the stipend, the student’s ratings of that gallery’s artwork similarly increased.
A very small amount of data reaches our conscious brain. Unfortunately, many of us have been led to believe that this is the data that influences our decision making. As a result, it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that our decisions are being made in a rational, fact-based manner.
If you are trying to make or influence better data-driven decision, it is not just important to present the right data. It’s equally important to avoid showing data that should not be used in the decision making process[1]. Data is any piece of information that could be used to influence a decision.
Take a look at your reports and presentations. Most are filled with extraneous data that might be impacting you or others without your knowing it. Anything that you don’t want influencing the decision should be removed.
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Brad Kolar is a consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors. Avail’s Rethinking Data workshop and consulting services can help your organization become more effective and efficient at data-driven decision making.
[1] It is important to note that I am not suggesting that you hide data that doesn’t support your conclusion or recommendation. That is unethical. You must always provide all of the relevant data needed to make a decision whether it supports your conclusion or not. My point is that you want to avoid data that is not actually relevant to the decision-making process such as the logos in the examples above.
