I came across this ad from 1952 for the UNIVAC computer, when "fact-power" was apparently something "sensational" and "new", and "fact-powered decisions" were an executive's dream. Given that we've been having some lively office debate around the validity of 'non-fact-based assertions', it spurred me to jot down my beliefs on the topic:
I find it hard to share Remington Rand's breathless enthusiasm for "fact-power", especially as regards marketing and communications. Thanks to today's information technology, we've all got an abundance of facts and figures, right at our fingertips. Facts about the market and about the consumer. Facts about the category and about the product. We've got data galore -a whole history, collated, analysed, graphed and bullet-pointed. We've got more facts than we know what to do with.
Now, there is no doubt that facts can be are useful -there is no substitute for a through understanding of the situation, and a well-picked fact can be the nugget that leads to great work (Guinness "good things come to those who wait" is a great example).
But 'fact-powered' decisions aren't infallible -data points are but a sample of reality and therefore don't always tell the full story (Russell found a lovely quote on this: “if you want to study a river you don't take out a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river, you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow” ). Facts are from the past, and the past can be a notoriously unreliable augur -the world changes, occasionally very quickly (as Steve Henry puts it, 'what is = what was'). And it can be very easy to be led astray by facts -Coke obsessed over taste-test results and launched New Coke, secure in the knowledge that they were making a 'fact-powered' decision. It wasn't that their facts were wrong but that they had based their decision on the wrong facts.
Further, in today's wired infosphere, one's competitors will generally have ready access to the exact same facts that you do. To succeed in a world of over-supply and product-parity, one needs to differentiate. Clearly then, to differentiate, one needs to look beyond the commonly-held fact base.
Under these conditions, we need much more than 'fact-power'. The key skill here is not left-brained fact-sifting but right-brained contextualisation. Facts are rarely engaging in and of themselves -it is the ways in which we convey them (for an excellent example, have a look at Hans Rosling's TED presentation) and the stories we weave around them that matter. And sometimes leaving the facts and research behind will get you to a far more interesting place -as Henry Ford said, "is I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".
I believe that we need to place the value on coming up with strategic ideas (widening the horizon) rather than merely coming to strategic conclusions (reducing it). We need to use research to help us develop powerful new insights, rather than simply using it to test, assess and re-hash the existing facts. We need to value intuition, fresh-thinking and finely-honed instinct. We need non-linear thinking, creativity, and story-telling (and we need to never let the facts stand in the way of a good story!)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there will ever be to know and understand." -Einstein
UNIVAC ad courtesy of Modern Mechanix via BoingBoing
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