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these are my comfort numbers!

My career in data and systems engineering classes made me keenly aware of exactly how much faith you should not have in data. When numbers are peer reviewed, the methods are studied, and the people are experienced, they can usually be trusted. Everything else is suspect.

In my days as an analyst, I realized that the way you defined a metric mattered far more than what the metric was. You can make these numbers sing or scream. Whenever I see leaders who focus on numbers in places where quality matters objectively more, like output, I know that these are comfort numbers. The vibes are bad, and they want any evidence of the contrary. Oftentimes, they twist the number to fit a decision or judgment they’ve already made. The numbers are mere comfort to assuage the doubts they’ve gathered in a rotten economy.

Look no further than the collared drones that roam the hallowed halls of consultancies like McKinsey, BCG, and Deloitte. With few (if any) exceptions, these consultants will solve your problems with one of three solutions:

  1. Cut costs: either with cheaper materials, fewer employees, or worse benefits
  2. Increase revenue: either with raised prices, the illusion of a premium product, or just straight up market manipulation
  3. Rebrand: because obviously Facebook and Meta are completely different (heavy sarcasm)

The goal of consulting (and most businesses today) isn’t to create value; it’s to create the illusion of value that you then sell to others. This is more or less the basis of the Hype Economy. Numbers can only be as accurate as what they’re measuring is objective. If I measure the loudness of a scream based on how much it hurts my ears on a scale of 1-10, it doesn’t mean much. This is why we measure sound in decibels. The cost of something beyond labor and materials is mainly greed and figuring out how much people are willing to pay.

Anyway, all of this to say that a lot of the desire to be “data-driven” lies in the desire to feel comfortable about bad or immoral decisions. I also see a very loose thread tying the comfort numbers to manufactured consent, but that’s a post for another day.