GUILFORD — One of the latest catch phrases commonly used to describe various systems in our country is “data-driven decision making.”
This term is meant to represent a positive approach to how various organizations and systems go about making decisions and setting standards and goals. The intent is to eliminate subjective determinations and make everything fact-based, without emotion.
We see this approach in how workers' performance is measured, how we design our school systems, how Amazon and Google run their businesses, and how political polls attempt to assess our thinking.
Although the value of this approach is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be quite harmful to many people, especially to those at the lower end of our various power structures.
To understand how this harm can happen, it's worth looking at the roots of our country's formation, when cotton was king and it was carried on the backs of enslaved people.
As most of us are well aware, the slave trade began in this country to primarily support the cotton industry. Enslaved women, men, and children were not viewed as people but instead, as property. They were traded at auctions and used as collateral for mortgages. (Thomas Jefferson built Monticello by obtaining a mortgage backed by 150 of his slaves.)
Work in the cotton fields, and in the cotton mills up North, was monitored and driven by elaborate data record-keeping systems. Performance standards were set and then arbitrarily increased in order to squeeze as much out of enslaved people as possible, pushing them to the limits of human endurance.
Strong performers were forced into pace-setter roles. Punishments were designed to reinforce the importance of meeting the ever-increasing production standards. It was very much a data-driven system, which yielded tremendous profits for Southern plantation and Northern cotton mill owners but a miserable life for workers. (An eye-opening article by Matthew Desmond about this topic recently appeared in The New York Times.)
It's important to step back and assess what we're doing today in terms of the impact on people, especially those at the lower-end of today's power structure.
How many of us have jobs where the expectation is that we're tied to our work 24/7 through phone calls, emails, and texts? (This requirement might not be formal, but it is often an unwritten expectation for workplace survival.) How many of our standards set for students, teachers, and workers are driven by data that may be valid but not reasonable or even humane, when considered in a quality-of-life context? Do political polls actually measure what we're thinking, or are they steering our thinking?
When we hear the phrase “data driven,” I suggest we not jump to the conclusion that this is positive but rather, look at what's behind that data and how it is impacting the quality of life for all people, including the impact on the environment we need to exist.
Sometimes quality of life, common sense, and the wisdom gained from life experiences are better ways to make thoughtful and just decisions.
Data-supported decisions might appear sensible, but are those decisions just?
Or are they simply reinforcing the biases and prejudices that already exist in most of our established systems?