"You can Amass the Facts and be totally wrong about their meaning."
How can someone be wrong if we're gathering all the facts about a needed situation in business? Can different people read the same data and come up with different conclusions? It's unfortunately done all the time.
How can that be? When Drucker says this, it seems to imply that there is no hope for gaining meaningful insights through gathering of information.
Drucker helps us with this be adding this statement right after what he said above: "As long as facts are interpreted by the old wrong theory, their predictions regarding behavior are much less reliable and wide of the mark."
All he is saying is if we are starting from the wrong foundation, all the information we consume will be skewed by that reality. Making effective decisions is almost impossible if we're working from the wrong assumptions.
Facts and information tell a story. We need to be able to read that story as it speaks to us, not how we want it to speak to us.
Information is supposed to offer us a guide or map on what steps to take in the near future. Read that map wrong, and you'll never get to the destination you think you're headed for. Not only that, but the desination you're setting out on can be all wrong as well. At this stage the mess is so great the best thing to do is simply drop the whole thing and start over from the right spot.
With the gathering of facts, it's essential that we understand our vision and purpose for the company. Not only can facts be misinterpreted from wrong assumptions, they can tried to be forced into who we are, without ever really having a chance of fitting.
Information is fickle and has to be handled cautiously. It's not that facts are necessarily wrong; if we do our homework right, they should give us an accurate picture. We just need to make sure we're looking at those facts with 20/20 vision rather than through a mirror blurred by the smoke of illusion.
We need to make sure our theories and foundations are set so that whatever information we gather is interpreted in the light of that, while finding if it fits our business needs or not. Anything less than that will make us read the informational compass wrong and take us in the wrong direction every time.
Other Peter Drucker Resources:
The Man Who Invented Management
Beyond the Information Revolution
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"You can Amass the Facts and be totally wrong about their meaning." [Read More]
Tracked on: June 18, 2007 7:24 PM | Permalink to Trackback