Dan Gregory @DanGregoryCo
In a world experiencing unprecedented change and, in fact, a rate of change that is accelerating itself, it’s very easy to become distracted by trends.
Trends, whilst interesting and occassionally very exciting, only tell half the story - data isn’t the answer… it’s input!
This makes our capacity to interpret and translate data into insights, or meaning making, a critical skill for leaders, business people and law makers trying to navigate an abstract and ever-evolving future.
This is principally because identical input does not necessarily lead to identical results.
For example, if you jump off a 1 metre high wall a hundred times, versus jumping off a 100 metre high wall once, you get rather different results.
Both exercises involve you traversing a horizontal distance of 100 metres by jumping off a wall, but only one will win you a Darwin Award and, if captured on video, a chance for the rest of us to experience the power over life and death using our rewind and fast-forward controls!!!
The point is, data is only as meaningful as the meaning we create from it. This means we need to learn to look beneath the trends to identify patterns so that we might discover what’s really going on.