The Story of John Henry the Data-Driven Man
In last week’s episode of This Human Business (available on iTunes, Stitcher, Castos, and SoundCloud) we explored the value that storytelling brings to business. In this bonus episode, the podcast practices what it preaches, bringing a bit of story to add context to the next episode.
The episode in the week to come will focus on research, and it will contrast the two basic models of research: Quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative research studies quantities – it calculates with numbers in its analysis.
Qualitative research, on the other hand, studies qualities – characteristics of things that cannot be reduced to numbers. There are companies out there that sell software they claim can perform qualitative research, but they’re not grasping the distinction. The minute you use numbers to analyze something in research, you’ve made your project quantitative by reducing qualities into something they’re not. Qualitative research is inherently subjective, and it takes a subject to understand subjectivity.
There are some people who say that you can quantify anything. They’ve forgotten the power of subjective experiences, like when you see the color blue. It’s not what your computer scans and interprets as the color blue, but the way you see it in your mind. That kind of thing is something that no instrument can measure, but it motivates your appreciation of a clear sky. It shapes your appreciation of beautiful things, and it molds the decisions you make in the marketplace.
There’s an imbalance in the research that’s conducted by businesses these days. With the advent of powerful digital technologies, quantification of everything imaginable has gone into overdrive.
The imbalance isn’t just in quantitative research. In response to the massive growth in the power of quantitative research, and the domination of the quantitative-digital perspective in business, many qualitative researchers have tried to follow the same path, imitating the characteristics of quantitative research while still claiming the distinction of qualitative research. They’re pushing qualitative research to get faster and cheaper, competing on the quantitative terms of supercomputers.
It’s what I call the John Henry effect.
Think back to the late 1800s, to the time when there was a rush to build railroads to make transportation more efficient, supporting the industrialization of the American economy. The locomotive rails were being laid everywhere, even in tunnels through the mountains.
Well, those tunnels didn’t come from nowhere. Human beings had to make them, through solid rock. Men would enter the tunnels with sledgehammers, and pound steel spikes to make holes into the rock, into which dynamite would be inserted to blast the rock apart.
John Henry was such a man, and proud of his work. So, he didn’t hesitate to express his anger at the news from company headquarters: A steel-driving machine, powered by steam, would be coming to the mountains, to do the work human steel drivers had done.
Not one to give up easily, John Henry challenged the machine to a race, to show that human muscle was stronger. The race began the morning after the machine arrived, and it lasted all day. Side by side, John Henry and the machine pounded holes into the rock, and true to his word, John Henry was faster, beating the machine by the slightest margin.
A human body isn’t built like a machine, though. John Henry’s efforts to keep pace with the machine broke him, and at the end of day when the race was complete, he fell down dead of a heart attack, with the hammer still in his hand.
John Henry died a hero, but his profession also died not long after him. Human beings still work digging tunnels, but they do so using power equipment, not sledgehammers. The machine lost in the short term, but it won the game in the long term. The humans who survived were those who chose to play a different game, using uniquely human skills.
It’s easy for us, looking back from our perspective to John Henry’s time, to see that it was foolish for him to try to compete with the steam-powered steel-driving machine. Hindsight is 20-20. It’s more difficult for us to figure out what to do in our own time, as we are confronted with technology that isn’t really the same as what John Henry faced in his own time. We are faced with machine learning in data mining rather than a steam engine employed in geological mining.
This similarity is worth remembering: For a human being to take on a machine in feats of raw power is foolhardy.
This podcast is dedicated to the idea that human beings have special qualities that make them invaluable to business, qualities that cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. However, there are some things that machines can do much better than human beings. Heavy duty physical labor is one of them. Calculating with numbers is another. Machines are also especially good at doing things fast.
A human researcher asking basic questions won’t be able to keep up with a computer designed to do the same thing. We can cut costs and burn the midnight oil all we want, but still not be able to compete with the next generation of chatbots that will be coming out soon.
Survey work, focus group moderation, and concept testing will all go to the bots. These methods are just too simple to avoid automation. Trying to keep up with the research bots will only lead to premature death by exhaustion.
We all know who’s going to own those bots, too. It’s the largest corporations with huge amounts of money that will be able to develop the winning systems. Unless you work at one of those big companies, you’ve already lost the race. They don’t call it Big Data for nothing.
So what choice do we have left for human research? We can choose not to race. Humans have never been the fastest creature in the world. We compete best on tasks that require slow attention.
The future of human research is to be found in slow qualitative work and reflective quantitative design. In a digital world where the big companies have the fastest technology, freelancers and small firms will gain their own kind of advantage by stepping back from the digital challenge and pursuing instead the kind of work for which there will never be any app.
The moral of this story is to work human. Don’t die with a hammer in your hand.
The next full episode of This Human Business will be out on Wednesday.