The VP’s finger hovered, then jabbed. Not at a problem, but at a solution already enshrined in pixelated glory. “As you can see,” his voice, carefully modulated to convey a certainty neither he nor anyone in the room truly felt, “engagement is up.” The screen behind him glowed with a triumphant green arrow, pointing northeast, a digital compass needle assuring us we were headed in the right direction. Nobody asked what ‘engagement’ actually meant. Nobody dared to inquire if this surge in a vague metric correlated with revenue, or customer retention, or even if it meant anything beyond the daily habit of clicking on a certain feature 3.3 times per user.
It’s a corporate séance, this ritual. We gather, consult the oracle of the dashboard, and receive our divinations. The green arrow, the rising curve, the subtly shifting bar graph-these are our corporate astrology charts. We aren’t data-driven; we are, almost universally, data-supported. We decide, then we forage through our data lakes (which are often more like data swamps, let’s be honest) until we find the glint of a data point, however peripheral, that can be polished into a justification.
I’ve been there, more times than I care to admit, on both sides of that table. I’ve started writing angry emails about the absurdity of it all, only to delete them before
