In the awesome book Hunch by Bernadette Jiwa, a fascinating concept caught my attention about the power of ideas and hunches vs data driven decision making and how companies apply them. Jiwa’s book dives into creativity, innovation, and the untapped potential of hunches, and I’m really enjoying it. One idea in particular got me thinking about how much time, effort, and brainpower does Google invest in tuning their algorithms, including adjustments as seemingly minor as tweaking the colours of hyperlinks? This kind of attention to detail—getting that exact right shade for links—has the potential to add a billion dollars a year to Google’s revenue but is it the right thing to do strategically?The interesting thing about being a data driven business is that this is the aspiration of every business - including my own. No one questions the value Data has added to our lives, to fighting diseases like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome saving thousands of lives around the world but “Data” is the new religion, the new operating system, the new unquestioned, undisputed operating system for the world. So the question might be - have we gone too far, can we go to far? Is there a better way to engage the most brilliant minds than data mining to add another billion to this year’s revenue? Is there a tipping point where there is a diminishing return in being data driven because we are effectively leaving the rest of the universe on the table? Do we end up living an algorithmic existence?
If Google’s AB testing raises click through rates it raises a question: Is all this energy spent on marginal gains worth it? With Google deploying some of the world’s most brilliant minds to optimize click-through rates or at least manage the algorithms that enable these - are they perhaps underutilizing their talent? Could the skills of these people be better spent on other, perhaps more meaningful projects like creating and reimagining solutions?Can an organisation be too data driven? If Google was 10% less data driven what would happen to the value created in the long term? I don’t know the answer….
In the end, there’s a whole world out there with endless discoveries to be made and questions to be asked that have limited data, unreliable data or no data. Should we always be so fixated on being data driven with our focus on incremental improvements, or should we sometimes step back, think bigger and follow our hunch?
As Jiwa points out - there is limited data on new things.
As I continue reading Hunch, I’m keen to see how Jiwa explores the balance between creativity and practicality—and I’ll share more soon in my full review.
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