Certainty
People in business love certainty. They portray data and insights with certainty: “Because we did this, this happened.” Great. Do that enough times and there’s a chance you’ll get promoted. Smart people speak with certainty. Certainty says that you know what you’re doing and you’re making the right decisions. Who doesn’t like to hear someone speak confidently based upon data?
Data-driven marketing is the dream, right? There is a truth behind the idea that providing you’re doing something based upon logic and data, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing something that’s actually useful. As Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy fame said, “It is much easier to be fired for being illogical than it is for being unimaginative,” and I think he’s right. There is a bias within business that providing you’re following the preexisting logic of the leadership team, you’re doing the right things, and that preconception has some level of logic – even if it’s a highly post-rationalised logic.
The unfortunate reality is that it’s not ‘good career management’ to present performance data with margins of error and a talk track that says “...it’s possible that literally nothing resulted from millions of dollars spent.” And agencies rarely have long-term success when they explain how “there’s a chance the results are statistically insignificant from background noise.”
Certainty is great when you’re building a bridge or constructing a skyscraper. Everyone wants engineers and architects to be certain their constructions won’t collapse or fail. That bridge you drive over every day to work – you want to be certain that it will still be there tomorrow and that when you drive over it you won’t end up in a river. That building you work in – you want to be certain that it won’t blow over or suffer damage in high winds.
But even bridges and skyscrapers only have certainty to a point. Engineers are certain a bridge is sound until they’re exposed to winds over a certain speed. Skyscrapers are safe unless there is an earthquake over a certain magnitude. The classic example of course is the Starship Enterprise from the Star Trek universe. “She cannae take it anymore, Capt’n,” a worried Scotty will inevitably yell at some point; except of course she does take it, somehow. It would be far less likely to elicit audience tension if he yelled “We’re straying into territory outside the simulated tolerances so it’s statistically more likely that there’ll be an issue soon.” And the series would have had far less of an enduring legacy if on episode three Scotty yelled “She’s gonna break up Capt-” as the ship disintegrates and he’s dragged into the empty vacuum of space.