How We Now Have the Opportunity to Overcome the Limits of Averaging

The Fourth Revolution and the availability of data and data processing allows us to go one step beyond looking at averages. We can now observe data distributions and figure out finer conclusions than those based simply on averages.

This seems only a small step, but right now our institutions and large companies still have not figured it out. It is is the same in projects – we only consider average performance. Average makes sense only when aggregating a large number of instances, but we lose so much information in doing so!

In particular we miss critical information on what is working better and where we can seek to learn what is the impediment to better performance. We miss information on the variability which is so important. Read Seth Godin’s post  On average, averages are stupid to have a great illustration of this effect.

Let’s get beyond averages and take benefit of the wealth of available data to produce better informed decisions!