The Operations Research / Management Science Blog

In his passionate talk, Dr. Hans Rosling tried to debunk the myths about economic and health issues in developing countries using state-of-the-art animation software developed by his foundation - Gapminder. The software, named Trendalyzer, converts boring data such as global income and health distribution into lively animations. Although the topic of his talk was not directly relevant to Operations Research (OR), it delivered a rather important message which sort of defines the values added by all the OR analysts to business organizations. What I learned from his talk is the importance of making arguments after doing thorough data analysis rather than relying only on common sense.

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Everyone knows the old saying that “the numbers speak for themselves”. However, not everyone who makes decisions for their organizations makes sure that they draw conclusions only after carefully studying the relevant data. Lots of business leaders tend to rely on their common sense, past experience and even intuition before making their next moves. Although good leaders usually have superior common sense, underestimating the importance of data analysis in a business-decision process can be fatal. Data analysis is critical for making decisions that are not subjective. There are many times when people discover that something they have always believed to be true turns out to be totally wrong after relevant data is collected, analyzed and interpreted. In this talk, Dr. Rosling mentioned that he made a test on the topic of child mortality in various countries. Each of the questions showed the names of a pair of countries and asked the test taker to indicate which one of the two had higher child mortality. It turned out that people who took the test (including “top” students and professors) did poorly because they had never seen data relevant to the issue and just answered the questions relying on their common sense about which countries are rich and which ones are poor.

He then showed that what most people have always believed to be true about the economy in Africa didn’t apply to all African countries. Data collected from different African countries indicated significantly different economic strength. Dr. Rosling said that “The problem is not ignorance. It is preconceived ideas.”. I can not agree more. People used to believe that the earth was flat. The worst decisions are made when our knowledge about something is totally incorrect and yet we believe we are right. This kind of mistakes are still quite common even in today’s business world, where the abundance of information is unprecedented. A lot of the “think-so’s” in business decision processes can be proven wrong using just data. Blind assumptions about future market trends can be totally different from the forecasts made by analyzing marketing data collected in the past.

The message delivered by this talk implies many things including how valuable the opinions provided by OR analysts can be to decision makers in organizations. OR analysts always put data before their intuition. They draw conclusions only after making sure that they have totally understood what the data is implying and that the data is of good quality. OR analysts are not the people who make the ultimate decisions in a company, but they are the consultants that provide objective suggestions using solid and unbiased data. More business owners should learn to benefit from the values added by OR analysts, who can help uncover the hints of making better decisions.