Are you a Symbol Juggler?

People in organizations say they are convinced that their data are their primary business asset, or at least, a very important one. When examining the way people use this asset, a very different picture pops up. Saying your data is important is something completely different from acting according to that insight. One of the roadblocks that need to be taken is to get rid of the symbol juggling practice you can find in all organizations.

Are you a Symbol Juggler?
There’s something tricky about data. What you see of them, as it happens, is not what they are all about. The only things you really see are symbols that represent the data in a certain context, presented on a monitor or on a piece of paper, or still some other media.

But the data in fact ARE no symbols. They are propositions about objects you perceive in your reality. Data describe a world, whether it is real or fictional. It’s just unfortunate that we need symbols for visualizing these descriptions.

The way we use symbols to represent and present data to a perceiver may easily lead you astray. It tends to make you believe that you’re only acting upon some values (the symbols!) that are arranged in some way and in a specific context, like this table in this database. The idea that you are actually manipulating descriptions of some reality, descriptions that are supposed to be true, often doesn’t come to mind.

However presentations with large sets of data can be quite helpful to people now and then, for example for quick searches when analyzing troublesome data, they prevent us from constructing the semantics of the data in our heads. Our brains are just not powerful enough to handle large amounts of information with a deep understanding, especially when handling a data set over a significant period of time.

The danger of all this is that people using the data might make wrong decisions that don’t match reality or are not appropriate for the real situation at hand.

If you symbol-juggle instead of handle semantics carefully, you’re simply not aware of what you’re actually doing, and you might harm reality by describing a world that is not correct. As a consequence of this, you or someone else might end up making the wrong decisions.

People who do this are either mindless symbol jugglers who don’t know what they are doing, or evil manipulators who know it all too well! In my opinion, these evil types belong in jail, whereas the mindless jugglers should take a course on a topic like Data Awareness!

But that probably isn’t a complete solution to this problem. I think we can do better. Data Awareness can also be good advice for the ones who design for user interfaces. I’m sure design guidelines can be found that can help improve human users to correctly handle the information that systems present to them. Any ideas?

I believe certain sorts of data maltreatments could be prevented if only people improved their sense of data and our systems were adapted to this juggling tendency. Because if there is one lesson to be learned from decades of automation, it would be that oftentimes creative users act according to a rule like this one:

IF I CAN DO THIS TRICK, I WILL DO THIS TRICK, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT I SHOULD DO THIS TRICK!

Hey, she's got to do her work!

Yeah, that’s our juggler!