[This
is part of the book: Basis Of Singaporean Spirit - People Power, click here to go to the main page]
A peculiarity of
government agencies is that they like to publish statistics. Whenever, there is
any controversy, there is always a statistics 'readily available' for them to
support any claims!
Well, we all know numbers don't lie. But we
also know that statistics does! Why do I state that statistics is
unreliable? First, let's take a look at the definition below.
Statistics is the study of the collection,
organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation
of data. It deals with all aspects of data including the planning of data
collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.
Noticed the underline words? Yes, any
faults at ANY of the underline words, either intentional or unintentional,
would make the statistics meaningless. So how reliable do you think statistics
really is?
I am always amazed with the efficiency of
how government agencies are able to publish statistics in such a short time.
Whenever there is any negativity, they
always seem to have 'ready statistics' to rebut. How could this ever be possible? Well, it
is possible, if they had used old data and surveys that were not meant for this
purpose.
Alternatively, they could also have sent
out surveys and questionnaires to people sitting beside them. So how can these
statistics be reliable?
A real survey may take weeks or even months
to design, not to mention executing them. Have you come across survey questions
that asked the same question but in a different way? Well, you are right, that
was intentionally designed to identify any wilful or careless answering.
Unless, you are able to inspect all the
data points and procedures used in the statistics, using statistics to convince
people is simply meaningless and stupid.
But is statistics useless? No, it depends
on its usage. Whenever statistics is used to support a claim or as proof, I
always take it with a pinch of salt.
Again, unless we can validate all the steps
taken to come up with the statistics, unless we can see how the survey and
experiment are designed, unless we can see how the sample pool is decided,
there is really no reason why we should treat it as any form of fact.
As a business process consultant, I love
statistics because that is how I measure the performance of organisation and
their processes and set KPIs[i]
to improve them! Without those statistics as a benchmark,
there is no reference for improvement initiative.
So remember, understand the basis of
statistics and don't treat it as a fact because it was never meant to be.
[i] KPI stands for Key Performance
Indicator. It is a performance measurement. In simple terms, if you meet it,
you are good; if you don't, you are bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment