Today is Election Day in the United States. Tonight, millions of people will watch the results come in, and most of us will be hoping for a particular outcome. It’s a vivid reminder of how hard it is to look at numbers without wanting them to say something.
The same thing happens in our organizations, just more quietly.
Before you open your next report, ask yourself a question:
What am I hoping this will tell me?
Maybe you’re hoping attendance is recovering. That the new program is working. That the investment was worth it. That the decision you advocated for was the right one.
There’s nothing unusual about that. We bring our hopes into our work because we care about it.
But those hopes can quietly influence what we’re willing to see.
I’m taking the Connection Course through the Art of Accomplishment with Joe Hudson, and one of the ideas I’ve been sitting with is impartiality.
In the podcast episode on impartiality, Joe makes a connection to data: when we’re attached to a particular outcome, it changes how we look at information and how we run experiments.
That got my attention.
I spend much of my work helping leaders understand what’s happening in their organizations. We talk about data quality, definitions, dashboards, and asking better questions. All of those matter.
But I’ve been thinking about what happens before any of that.
How willing are we to discover something we didn’t want to be true?
The conclusion can arrive before the question
Imagine a church launches a new connection event. The team puts months into it. Staff and volunteers give their evenings. Leadership talks about it from the stage.
Afterward, the question is: Did it work?
That sounds like an open question. But there might already be a preferred answer in the room.
The event had strong attendance. People seemed enthusiastic. There were good stories to share.
Those things count. They also might not tell us whether people formed relationships or took another step afterward.
If the purpose was connection, we might need to look beyond who showed up. Did first-time participants return? Did they join a group? What happened to the people who expressed interest but never connected?
Each question gives us another opportunity to learn. Each also creates the possibility of an answer we would rather not hear.
It’s easy to stop at the number that feels reassuring.
Especially when going further might require us to reconsider something we worked hard to build.
What are we asking the number to carry?
A disappointing result can feel like more than information.
It can feel like a judgment on our leadership, our effort, or our ability to make good decisions.
If I recommended the program, questioning its results might feel like questioning me.
I think that’s part of what makes impartiality difficult. We’re trying to understand what happened while also hoping to feel competent, useful, and right.
I can recognize that pull in my own work. I want the analysis to help. I want to find something meaningful. I want the work I do to make a difference.
Those are good desires to acknowledge. They can also make it harder to leave room for an inconclusive answer, a flawed assumption, or a finding that sends us in a different direction.
The question I’m taking from this into my work is:
Can I care deeply about the outcome and still give the evidence room to change my mind?
A little more room to see
For me, practicing this starts with naming the hope before interpreting the result.
“I’m hoping this shows that people are becoming more connected.”
“I want to know whether this investment is helping, and I’m nervous that it might not be.”
“I’ve advocated for this approach, so I may be inclined to defend it.”
Saying those things makes the attachment easier to notice.
Then we can ask a few questions that give us more room:
What would make us reconsider our explanation?
Would we use the same definition of success if the numbers were moving in the other direction?
What does this report establish, and what are we adding to it?
Sometimes the answer will be that the data is incomplete. Sometimes we need a different comparison or a conversation with the people behind the numbers. Sometimes the finding really does challenge the plan.
We have to leave room for all of those possibilities.
The people behind the answer
In a mission-driven organization, there’s a particular cost to protecting a reassuring story.
If we stop at a strong attendance total, we might miss the people who came once and never found connection.
If we focus only on how many people a program served, we might miss whether it helped them.
If we need the strategy to be working, we may overlook the very information that could help us serve people better.
That’s what keeps bringing me back to this idea.
I want leaders to have information they can trust. I also want us to be able to stay curious when that information is uncomfortable.
I’m still learning how to do that myself. But it’s changing how I think about the conversations we have around data, especially when the findings challenge something we hoped was true.
Inspired by what I’m learning in the Art of Accomplishment’s Connection Course and the podcast episode Impartiality, with Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler.
A question for your leadership team
What are we hoping our data will tell us, and how might that hope be shaping what we’re willing to see?
