In 2010, American research professor, author and public speaker Brené Brown delivered one of the most widely viewed TEDx talks, titled “The power of vulnerability”, propelling her into the cultural mainstream, and elevating her decades-long work on the themes of vulnerability, courage, empathy, shame and leadership.
Two years later, Brown published her New York Times bestseller, “Daring Greatly”, which explores the power of vulnerability and how embracing it can lead to greater courage, connection and creativity, further augmenting her popularity in the corporate and working space.
Brown’s work has also been centred around emotions, specifically those critical to learning and knowledge acquisition. This has linkages to epistemic emotions – those related to our cognitive processes, such as curiosity, confusion and wonder.
In “Daring Greatly”, Brown advocates that embracing discomfort, confusion and uncertainty is critical for creativity, innovation and learning. By avoiding vulnerability, and the emotions attached to uncertainty, the learning process can be shackled.
In the same year “Daring Greatly” was released, Sidney D’Mello, a psychologist and computer scientist at the University of Notre Dame, published a study that demonstrated that confusion during the learning stage “can be beneficial if it is properly induced, effectively regulated and ultimately resolved”.
Without proper knowledge, businesses today are making poor decisions in the data analytical space, resulting in wasted resources.
The study found that “inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems”.
The works of Brown and D’Mello bear application on how South African businesses, organisations and even government approach the practice of data management, engineering and analysis: with complete and total confusion.
This confusion around the vastness of data landscapes instead becomes a negative driver, discouraging these entities from improving their data integration, infrastructure and insights that could have been leveraged for decision-making. Being in a data age demands companies to explore further innovative solutions on how to use data.
Shoprite has maintained its competitive-edge as South Africa’s largest retail player because of the continuous investment in its data infrastructure. Its Xtra Savings customer loyalty programme (built over many years) has provided it with mountains of customer data, such as purchasing behaviour and preferred products.
Through this model, Checkers can provide customers with personalised discounts at any time on products they know that unique customer will want to purchase again, guaranteeing a sale for Shoprite in the near future. It is therefore little to no surprise that Shoprite experienced a 17.8% increase in sales revenue growth in 2023.
Unfortunately, taking a disciplined approach in managing and safeguarding data effectively is not practised across the board. The latest exposé of SASSA’s Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant system is a case in point. Potentially thousands of identity numbers have been used fraudulently to claim the SRD grant, without the ID holders even being aware, having not made the application themselves.
Nonetheless, while data systems are complex to grasp, the services offered by data system management providers are infused with marketing tactics.
They overpromised technologies laden with unnecessary artificial intelligence tools, which can inflate the confusion experienced by companies, and result in them rejecting the concept of better data management practices, or falling into the trap of purchasing an overpriced or overbuilt system.
What is worse, companies are often locked into a service level agreement by these providers. After building the data system for them, these providers go on to manage and control the system full-time, leading to monthly costs for the service. The result is that customers never get to fully learn their own system and build on that for further innovation.
Without proper knowledge, businesses today are making poor decisions in the data analytical space, resulting in wasted resources. Without clear data measurement and management, companies could end up inputting garbage data into their overly complex systems, embedded with unnecessary AI features, with the output being garbage insights and analysis.
Companies that then base vital decisions on this kind of data will soon find themselves in trouble.
This is where the concept of ‘radical ethics’ would find application. Conceptualised by Australia-based data consultancy company Hermit Tech, this school of thought opposes the trend of using ineffective data analytical investments and adopts a framework that ensures customers achieve their desired outcomes without being anchored down by products that do not suit their needs.
The approach is founded on the principle that there are no shortcuts for companies to get the data system they truly need. It requires hard work, ownership and autonomy of their system and data.
The purchasing of the software alone is not sufficient. Organisations need to build internally engaged, competent teams that develop skills like coding, data management and design to understand the anatomy of the systems they inherit from providers.
Equally important, ‘radical ethics’ requires that these systems be open source, empowering organisations to truly own their own systems, and for internal teams to innovate it when the needs of the organisation change.
This approach leads to businesses gaining full independence over their systems and building data sovereignty over time.
Confusion around data should not discourage or frustrate us. Instead, it should be used as a tool of motivation to encourage organisations into thinking deliberately around what they do not understand and propel them to develop a solution with a revised approach that is reinforced by deeper learning, knowledge acquisition and understanding.
Only then can effective data usage and management make a marked difference in South Africa.
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