I have a strange relationship with data.
On one hand, I’m stunned by the rapid pace with which we synthesize vast amounts of information about people and their behavior. As a marketer, I’ve grown accustomed to the ease I can identify audiences and their interests. For someone who is both creative and data-literate, I’ve found some success in designing compelling media campaigns that effectively draw “the right” people in.
On the other hand, this same data can feel like a Pandora’s box of infinitely spiraling information. A successful ad campaign or marketing journey can always be improved if only we knew a little more—tweak the subject line, swap interests, bold/no bold, pre-roll or display—The modifications are endless; the perfect campaign just out of reach.
It can be hard to know when and where to stop, which seems to hit at the core of Google and Meta’s data collection dilemma.
But it’s not just collecting data about others. Our data times ask that we measure ourselves and our work—masked as impressions, conversions, long-term engagement, OKRs and so on. These metrics offer the allure of seeming objectivity, and, when I love data, I think of behavioral patterns as offering a high-power creative writing workshop—I get a close approximation to the way a ton of users navigate and digest the information that I present.
But I wonder if this cycle is addictive, both for individuals and organizations. We can disperse praise for high performers that appears fair and design performance plans to draw folks up to what we define as the average. Individuals, in theory, earn a sense of security at work because they know what’s required to meet expectations (I don’t fall into that bucket, btw … I’m excited to someday meet this fella named “Self-security”).
But I’m curious about what gets missed when we position ourselves as objective—which might be the human story behind these numbers. And, if we lose sight of each person’s individuality, I wonder if we end up incentivizing regression to the mean.
In college, my English literature and creative writing classes sought to acknowledge the complexity of human experience and offered me tools to articulate my worldview. My faculty taught me that for every prediction, there was an exception, and no amount of categorization could take away the unique lens through which I perceived and articulated my world. That posture felt fun and subversive in my early career, especially as I sought to understand behaviors, organizations and ideas outside of the mean.
Now that I’m in my forties, I spend more time reflecting on the story I’ve sought to tell. Despite our data times, I try to be less interested in where I land on the bell curve of particular experiences, even when that information helps me detach from work that I like but need to improve. More often than not, the through-line of my reports tends to come back to my wanting to express that I try really, really hard to create things that matter and that my work ethic blends with an ability to read social context and creatively respond to others’ expectations. These are skills and goals that are hard to quantify. Just the impulse to try affirms the grip data holds on me.
Tim Grassley 