Can I convince you to give up smoking by telling you every year eight million deaths are related to smoking-related diseases?
If you’re hard-headed like me, you’d think “sorry, I won’t be among the next 8 million, the statistics don’t work out”.
This is not a space to run an anti-smoking campaign. I’m talking about data-first ideology.
As the world moves toward data-centric decisions. Or at least, they think so, there is a huge mismatch between the data and the actions.
It is important to cultivate a generation that doesn’t succumb to their biases and selfish motives. At the same time, it is probably more than important to cultivate an understanding of human nature.
On a yearly basis, we’re producing Business Analysts and Data Scientists. They’re job roles. Trained and expected to throw data. But depending on their counterparts to make sense of the data.
The only thing that has the power to change our decisions in the long run, is our experience. This doesn’t mean scheduling a cancer hospital visit in order to prove a point for a smoker. It means providing a liberating experience in our interactions with the smoker. Interactions where the emotional part is gently touched and eventually nudged to reconsider.