Another key reason why clusterfucks appear is because somebody with the authority wants them to appear. Stalin is said to have purposely given his cabinet conflicting portfolios to paralyze them: essentially giving him a free hand to denounce them and go about doing what we wanted to anyway. We have all observed similar situations where very brilliant people will purposely ask a team of people, none of whom have the authority to make any lasting decisions, to execute some task. Even if communication is good and trust exists among the participants, the very nature of the power vacuum is bound to cause a clusterfuck unless the team anoints an interim leviathan. It’s exceedingly rare. It is entirely possible that some[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
If you’ve been attending the Web Analytics Association Research Committee calls, you’ll know that I’ve been troubled by this question of a ‘common data set’. As it is right now, data that is common, clean, and relevant to web analytics is rare. To be sure, there are heaps of open source log files (I believe the Wiki Foundation made 5 terabytes available for download awhile back), but in terms of there being some manageable CSV file out there – it’s pretty rare. Such a dataset is pretty useful from a few perspectives. For one, it would enable researchers within our community to use a verifiable data source when making assertions about the importance of different metrics. I’m dissatisfied with what[…]
Sometimes even when people trust each other, information can still get garbled through faults in communication. Very frequently, professionals in a given field will begin using a very specific jargon. For instance, the term “unique” means something very different to a web analyst than it does to a fashion designer. These shortcuts in language serve a really important purpose within a profession, and the specificity and unity on that jargon is a key feature of any given culture. When two professions need to work together, in an inter-disciplenary way, it is very easy to miscommunicate important findings, purely through mistakes in language. Sometimes, something as simple as messing up the difference between ‘pageviews’, ‘visits’, ‘visitors’ and ‘unique visitors’ can have[…]
One of the core reasons for organizational clusterfucks is a lack of trust among the participants or groups of participants. Generally speaking, if there is no trust, there is limited communication (because, of course, refusing to talk to somebody can be a form of limited communication – right?). Even if two respective hierarchies mandate communication, if there is no trust, people on either side will be very crafty in interpreting rules so stringently so as to limit communication. Worse, distrust over years can become pervasive and infectious, like a plaque that builds up. We saw this in the years leading to Air India. Sometimes there is a legitimate incentivization for distrust. I won’t share competitive information with competitors out of[…]
I watched a wonderful Nature last night on PBS. It was about a bunch of baboons on the Serengeti. It was a pretty brutal hour and instructive. People in their own way are complex and they form complex systems with complex relationships and complex rituals. How hierarchies form and persist is something a few of us within the Toronto innovation community has been struggling with – especially around this relationship between ‘networks’ and ‘hierarchies’. Every so often – people can’t or won’t get a long, expectations aren’t communicated or registered, and our complex systems break down. The specific question is: “What causes clusterfucks”? That’s the central question of the week.
A few very good discussions were had at Bar Wellington last night. It was really great to see Sascha back from London, even if it was only for an evening. We got into mobile analytics and I praised the recent of efforts of our Mia Umanos for working so hard with the Web Analytics Associations’ Research Committee and the mobile analytics project. Mobile analytics is not easy, but there are very large opportunities to demonstrate the value of the channel using the method. I ‘d like to see the ETL process for mobile analytics get better. I’d hope that those vendors would pick up where traditional web analytics companies have left off – and who knows, there might be a[…]
Six key steps in facilitation when you’re trying to heard a group through a problem: Opening: State why you’ve called the meeting, where we’ve come from before, what’s the goal of today’s discussion, and where you hope to go to next. Objective Questions: Ask about the facts and get them on the table. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Reflective Questions: Ask what people are experiencing. Questions like: What ____________ are you experiencing when that happens? Everybody is entitled to feel how they want to feel. Interpretive Questions: The analytical portion of the discussion. Is X >Y? If so why, if not, why not? Decisions Questions: Which ones are high priority? Which are not[…]
I’m looking forward to paneling at IMC Vancouver on September 18th. The topic is social media for business. Naturally, I’ll be talking about social media analytics. The intersection of business strategy, quantitative methods, and online word of mouth (social media) has the capacity to be really powerful in the hands of somebody who understands that it’s actually a medium. There’s message, there response, there’s measurement of that response, there’s an opportunity to improve upon the next message. It’s also like any other medium too. You got to pay to play. It isn’t free. It isn’t free for your customers either. Social media still takes time and attention time: and that’s still a cost. But the difference is that it’s never[…]
Jose reviewed an interesting journal article: “Path Data in Marketing”. You can read it at that link, at the Web Analytics Assocations’ Research Committees’ Peer Review Journal’s Project. And, it got me into thinking more about path analysis. To a web analyst, traditionally, a path analysis is examining a sequence of pages that were viewed. Back in the nineties we used to call such analysis ‘threading’: and we always chose to examine pages and the sequence. Threading was computationally expensive during the nineties, when volume was low, and it continues to be very computationally heavy for vendors to this day – even with improved algorithms: the volume hurts. How much does Page Path Analysis (Maddeningly: even when we use the[…]
I’m absolutely loving this Yu Wan Mei takeover of The Onion. In case you don’t know, The Onion is a satirical newspaper, and Yu Wan Mei is a fictional company. Dame Edna once said something to the effect “if you have to explain satire – don’t bother”, and that was in reference to the controversy over a remark about Americans learning Spanish and Selma Hayek freaking out about it. I guess I’ll only explain why I’m reveling in it all. We have techniques in Political Science (in fact, it has it’s own discipline) where by comparing two countries (or institutions) you can learn a lot more by than just by examining each one alone. It’s the comparative method and it’s[…]