Data or Gut?
I was at a League 2 football game recently and just prior to the match starting, asked someone in our group, (who knows far more about this division than I will ever do), what the capacity of the ground is.
“27,000” he replied.
I turned to him, (thinking he was winding me up given that 3 of the four stands were single storey), and seeing he was serious said, “No way!” – he responded, “It is, I looked it up earlier.”
This gave me a dilemma. On the one hand my gut instinct told me that the ground was a really small one, well below the average 10,000 for this division, on the other my friend is super bright and more often than not is correct whenever we debate something. So I googled it too.
I went to three different sources, none of which agreed, but the range for the stadium was 5,996 to 6,134 – this gave me the confidence to challenge my friend whose source was clearly wrong, and we both laughed at the discovery (mine was somewhat louder!).
What it highlighted was something that’s been troubling me for a while – the reliance bordering on dependence on data and technology, and how it’s often treated as infallible.
Let me share three examples most of us can relate to:
- Satnav – how often does yours suggest a circuitous route, for example taking you off a motorway only to rejoin it from the same exit roundabout?
- Temperature – there’s been many times when a meeting room has been far too warm/cold because someone has relied on the aircon temperature settings.
- Google – once a reliable source, but now more often unhelpful/wrong/biased as the algorithms have developed to favour the advertiser over the searcher.
Don’t get me wrong, I bet all of us can cite many examples where human opinion is far less helpful than data, but it feels that many people have developed an unhealthy trust of data over gut.
When dealing with important things, I now ask my gut first and then go and research the data. This isn’t foolproof either, but seems to serve me better than a reliance of one or another.
And in case you were thinking that football isn’t important, let me remind you of Bill Shankly’s famous (albeit tongue-in-cheek) quote: “Somebody said that football’s a matter of life and death to you, I said ‘listen, it’s more important than that’.”
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