Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 2 of 5]

Analytics as Performance Theater

Your team is sophisticated. They have dashboards. They track everything.

But watch what they do.

Sales drop. They review last quarter’s tactics.

User traffic falls. They copy last year’s actions.

Customer complaints rise. They use the same fix.

This is data-driven thinking.

"I've seen this before. I'll do what worked."

It looks smart and scientific.

But it's just copying.

Here's the scary part.

Entire teams do this.

Marketing teams copy marketing teams. Product teams copy product teams. Engineering teams copy engineering teams.

Why? Because copying feels safe. Nobody gets fired for doing what everyone else does.

Our people do this. We follow what worked for others. We avoid being different.

But here's what's weird.

Some teams break out. They see the same data. They face the same problems. But they do something different.

They're not copying old solutions. They're asking new questions.

They see different possibilities.

What makes them different?

Why don't more teams think this way?

In Part 3, the difference between data driven and data inspired.