The red dot of the laser pointer quivers on the wall, a nervous insect dancing over the Y-axis of a chart so dense it looks like a city grid seen from space. Twelve different metrics, twelve tangled lines of varying color. It’s supposed to represent ‘Q4 User Engagement Dynamics,’ but it feels more like a failed EKG. ‘As you can see,’ the presenter says, his voice trying to project a certainty his trembling hand betrays, ‘the numbers are trending.’

And we all nod. Of course we do. It’s the sagest, most profound-looking nod we can muster. We are a room full of bobbleheads in business casual, performing our deep understanding of the data. No one asks what the purple line means. No one questions why the green one suddenly plummets in week 44. To do so would be to admit you’re the only one in the room who doesn’t get it. The secret, of course, is that nobody gets it. Not really. The chart isn’t there to be understood; it’s there to be witnessed. It’s an artifact of diligence, a testament to the fact that we are a ‘data-driven’ company. We have the numbers. Therefore, we are in control.

The Unspoken Fiction

This is the great, unspoken fiction of modern business. We are drowning in numbers but starved for meaning. We’ve become data hoarders, collecting terabytes of the stuff under the delusion that ownership equals insight. We spend weeks, sometimes months, building complex dashboards that are presented once with great ceremony, and then left to wither in a forgotten corner of a server, unvisited and unloved. I know this because I built one of those digital mausoleums.

It was a marketing analytics suite for a product launch a few years back. I was adamant. We needed to track everything. Not just clicks and conversions, but scroll depth, time-on-page-by-referral-source, exit percentages correlated with browser type, and 44 other KPIs I’d gleaned from various thought-leader blogs. My team spent 234 hours building it. The final product was beautiful. It was a symphony of data visualization. It cost the department over $4,400 in specialized software licenses alone. And in the six months following the launch, exactly 4 people in the company logged in to view it more than once. I was three of them.

We didn’t make a single strategic decision based on that dashboard. Not one. The crucial insights didn’t come from the tangled web of lines on my screen; they came from two angry customer service calls and a casual remark our lead salesperson overheard at a trade show. We had built a cathedral of data when all we needed was a conversation. I was so obsessed with the idea of being data-driven that I had completely forgotten the objective: to understand our customers. The data became the goal, not the tool. It’s an embarrassingly common mistake, the corporate equivalent of meticulously counting every calorie you consume but never actually asking if the food you’re eating is nourishing.

Beyond the Numbers

I’m reminded of a man I met at a conference, a body language coach named Emerson C. He was an odd character. While everyone else was talking about micro-expressions and tells, Emerson talked about the ‘energetic temperature’ of a room. He claimed you could learn more from the way people collectively shift in their seats after a difficult question than you could from a 4-page survey. I was skeptical, of course. It sounded like mystical nonsense. I collect data; I don’t read auras.

Then he told me a story. He was hired by a struggling tech firm to observe their board meetings. The company had all the data. They had dashboards for everything: churn rates, developer velocity, market penetration. And every dashboard showed things were going badly. The board spent hours staring at these charts, debating the nuances of a 4% dip here or a 1.4% rise there. They were paralyzed. Emerson watched them for a day, then he gave his diagnosis. ‘Your problem,’ he told the CEO, ‘is not on these screens. It’s in your chairs. Nobody in this room breathes properly.’ He said the data was so overwhelming it had made them forget their own physical and intuitive responses. They were analyzing the map so intensely they failed to notice the ship was taking on water.

His advice was absurd. He made them put away the data for one meeting. Instead, he made them stand up and debate the company’s future as if they were arguing about it in a bar. No slides, no charts. Just intuition, experience, and belief. The energy shifted. The arguments became clearer, the convictions stronger. They made more concrete decisions in 14 minutes of standing and talking than they had in the previous 14 hours of staring at data. It’s a radical thought, isn’t it? That sometimes the most valuable data points are the ones that can’t be quantified-the gut feeling, the shared glance, the palpable sense of excitement or dread in a room.

We treat intuition as the enemy of strategy, a flaky, unreliable relic of a pre-digital age. But our obsession with performative data analysis often just provides a veneer of objectivity for decisions we were going to make anyway. It’s a shield. If the decision proves wrong, we can blame the data. It’s a way of outsourcing our professional courage. In contrast, a platform that genuinely relies on data for its core function can’t afford such theatrics. The systems behind an operation like gclub จีคลับ must use data with relentless clarity-to manage risk, to calculate real-time odds, to ensure the integrity of every transaction. There, the data isn’t a performance; it’s the entire mechanism. For most of us in corporate life, however, our dashboards are just expensive security blankets.

Asking the Right Questions

The real problem is that we’re asking the wrong questions.

We start with the data we have, and then we try to torture a question out of it. The far more powerful, and far more terrifying, question is: ‘What is the most important thing we need to know right now, and how might we find that out?’ The answer might not be in a database. It might be in a conversation with someone who quit. It might be in using your own product for a week. It might be in the silence that follows a question in a team meeting.

I’ve started to change my approach. I was on a video call the other day, and I realized I had accidentally turned my camera on far earlier than I intended. For a few moments, before the meeting officially started, the other early arrivals could just see me, sitting at my desk, staring into space. The feeling of being observed without the usual professional mask was jarring. And it made me think: that’s what we need from our data. We need to see things as they are, not as we’ve neatly packaged them for a presentation. We need the raw, uncurated, sometimes awkward truth.

Now, before we build any new report or dashboard, my team has to answer one question: ‘What decision will this number help us make tomorrow?’ If there’s no clear, immediate answer, we don’t track it. Our reports have become drastically simpler. And infinitely more useful. We’ve abandoned the pretense of knowing everything and embraced the focused pursuit of knowing what matters. We’ve traded the comfort of a full dashboard for the power of a single, meaningful number. We still use data, of course. But we no longer worship it.