Avoiding “Quant Bias”

In a recent interview for Forbes, Lynzie Riebling, VP of Insights & Strategy at REVOLT TV, deplored the “quant bias” that prevented most companies from getting more out of their research efforts. What she meant by this term was that many executives seem to place more credence in research findings that can be quantified, to the point that they overlook the advantages of inherently non-quantifiable insights that can be uncovered with qualitative research.  

And I’m sure you’ve noticed this yourself. Place a decimal point behind a figure and people tend to grant it even more credibility. This fact has been calculated, they think. This is mathematical.

This is how numbers – continuous, carefully calculated and accurate numbers – have become a must-have for any successful business. After all, as the saying goes,

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

But of course, nothing is farther from the truth than this statement! Often you damn well MUST manage things that cannot be measured. And it turns out that this meme, often attributed either to W. Edwards Deming or to Peter Drucker, was never uttered by either of these brilliant business thinkers; in fact they each said pretty much the opposite. 

Unfortunately, however, this idea has permeated our business psyche, fueled by numbers-oriented sales pitches, surveys that purport to describe popular sentiment or practices, and bureaucratic organizational principles that require “hard data” to make more “objective” decisions.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of objective decisions. Definitely. But the human brain itself is not a calculator, and to pretend that it is one is to invite disaster. Your brain is a complex system of interconnected feelings, instincts, and rationalizations. Research has shown that we make most of our decisions based on these sometimes conflicting emotions and feelings, and then we use the reasoning power in our prefrontal cortex to explain these decisions not just to others, but to our own conscious selves. Experiments involving people whose brains have had the left hemisphere separated from the right have proved conclusively that our conscious understanding of reality itself is indeed fragile.

So while your brain is not a calculator, your conscious self must still rationalize its own feelings about the world, and numbers are a great way to do this. Hence the quant bias.

Dealing with the quant bias requires us to think more carefully about how we represent the world’s true complexity and unpredictability within our own minds. For one thing, when doing market research, we should focus not just on the data, but on the more qualitative stories behind the data, blending and mending our quantitative thinking by constantly exploring for more stories and perspectives, qualitatively. As I’ve argued before, the net effect of this will be to conduct our research in a more “agile” manner, which will allow us to come to decisions more quickly and accurately.

But in addition, perhaps we ought to think more carefully about the steps a business manager can take to guard against succumbing to the quant bias in other, non-research roles. If you want to make more objective, unbiased decisions in the future, based on the customer data available, here are a few suggestions: 

• Avoid framing the answer to any business question in terms of a single number. Try to frame it in terms of ranges and probabilities, instead. Yes, that’s still quantitative, but it’s a more open-ended way to approach a decision.
• Ask the WHY questions necessary to explain the stories behind your data and numbers.
• Apply “active listening” principles to any market research findings. Think about your research as if it were a participant in a conversation with you: What open-ended question would you ask to gain the greatest insight? How would you “probe” an issue to understand it more thoroughly? 
• Search carefully for disconfirming evidence and give this evidence a fair hearing.  You might want to consider appointing a “devil’s advocate” to argue the other side of any issue. Warren Buffett, for instance, appoints two bankers to help in a merger or acquisition. One gets a bonus if the deal goes through, and one gets a bonus if it doesn’t.

In just a few weeks I’ll be keynoting CallMiner’s Customer Engagement Transformation Exchange. This will be a two-day virtual event for CX professionals and contact center leaders, August 18 and 19, and I’ll be discussing at greater length some of the tactics business managers can use to make better, more scientific decisions with the wealth of customer data now available.