As complex systems grow and evolve, we often lose sight of the purpose for which they were brought into existence. Sometimes these systems, inadvertently start moving in directions that are orthogonal to, and sometimes opposed to, their original purpose.
While I was a student, I came across A Pattern Language, a book, ostensibly about architecture, but one that introduced me to a useful way of thinking about systems other than architecture. I found that this approach is especially useful in solving problems in many complex systems.
On Earth Day 2017 I marched for science together with more than 100,000 people in the US and around the world.
It was refreshing to see so many people holding signs declaring their support for science and evidence-based decisionmaking. But what now? Most rational people, once they stop to think about it, do support reason and even the most extreme politicians try to justify their views and actions within a logical framework. Yet that framework is often not based on data and evidence, but instead on beliefs and personal experience.
In many American colleges and universities, undergraduates are required to take courses in a diverse set of areas. These depth requirements mean that they even if they are majoring in the humanities, they may be required to take, not just a single science course, but several courses. Some curricula may even specify that several of these courses have to be at a level higher than a specified minimum.
Analytics are key, everyone agrees. And I agree too. But most times, at the start of these analytics focused efforts there is a strong consensus that, of course, these have to be 'good analytics', and not just any analytics. But by the time the conversation gets around to selecting the actual metrics to be used, we have wandered far into the territory of what is available, what is possible, what is measurable, or what is already measured, that we settle on something not just far from ideal or suboptimal, but something that is often counter-productive, or something that just perpetuates the old paradigms and a few years later, when many of the players have left the arena, we shake our head and wonder why we ever bothered.