These days many people come to me asking what should be done in times of crisis. Mostly, of course, they encourage buying expensive services. Let me summarize in a few thoughts what I would do in your place.
However uncomfortable it is to face the fact, we mostly make our decisions on an emotional basis. If it were not so, there would no longer be any need for leaders. A business or a company could be run by a robot, an algorithm, or, to use today's fashionable buzzword, "artificial intelligence".
But if we are going to make decisions anyway, let's do so taking facts into account as much as possible. And if we stick to facts, we need data. Data is the thing that simplifies facts, makes them aggregable. It gives us the opportunity to identify trends and differences. So we should strive to have as much data as possible, structured as well as possible.
Of course you might feel that everyone already knows this. And there's the controller and controlling department too. In reality, the situation is that because of our emotion-based decisions, we feel less need to turn facts into data. There's no time for it, nobody likes doing admin, we've always done it this way and we've gotten by so far.
I once heard a story about a turkey. The turkey felt safe behind the fence in the farmyard. Every evening the farmer locked it into the coop, where it was nice and warm. Every day it got plenty of corn and water. The weather was nice, the days passed in peace and quiet, and the turkey was convinced that everything was in perfect order.
Until one day Thanksgiving arrived…
