Trend towards “big data” is breeding attitude of “false certainty”, says Ogilvy & Mather’s Rory Sutherland

He said big data may become a “terrifying battleground” in which decisions are based entirely on spreadsheet logic rather than anything more abstract.

“The reason I’m worried about this false certainty is that I see big data as being a rather terrifying battleground which will be seized upon by people with pretty good statistical understanding, but who will tend to make perfect models out of things using various complex mathematical tools, which may not only be inappropriate to the task at hand but based on data that isn’t even particularly relevant,” he said.

He said people in business have a “disproportionate” love of any decision that relies on a mathematical formula or model, because it means they can “offload” the burden of an important decision onto something other than themselves, according to Sutherland. “That worries me,” he added

To demonstrate the point he referenced a technique used and later scrapped by the RAF during the second world war due to the fact that the source data being used wasn’t accurate. This comprised analysing the areas of war planes which had multiple bullet holes, to determine how to improve them.

There soon developed a pattern showing that specific areas of the planes all had multiple bullet holes so they spent a serious sum of money reinforcing those select parts of the plane with armour plating.

However, the plan was then dropped once they realised that the data they had gathered was actually from the wrong planes, according to Sutherland.

“All the aircraft on which they were basing their data had survived so their entire database was based on data that revealed where you can shoot at a plane and not make it crash. The data they should have been analysing was on the planes lying at the bottom of the English channel. This is precisely one of the dangers in this obsession with certainty,” he said.

#OgilvyChange is the specialist behavioural sciences practice of Ogilvy & Mather UK.

Sutherland heads up a partnership between the #ogilvychange practice and Pimp My Cause, creating a field lab for implementing behavioural insight in addressing real world social problems.