Blog.

Art vs. Science

In this blog post, Jason Foster, considers whether art or science plays the most important part in creation of a data guided organisation. He explores the influence art has on the success – and failure, of data science strategies, along with the right blend to achieve positive outcomes. What’s more important in your data strategy: art or science?

One Big Message

The science is something that is needed, but it’s art that really drives the difference.

Art of Leadership

The art of executing plans and leading them in a really strong way makes a difference. Talking about the art of planning, shaping, defining, and changing culture, the art of management, influence, communication, and storytelling are the things that make someone a good leader of data and the ability to do these, make it possible to really change the narrative of data within an organization. 

It’s the thing that really drives the change required. It means that you can truly add value in your organization. This sort of rich insight can be used to make decisions, to know what’s going on, what to interact with and get more value because of it.

Art against Science

There’s been a lot of rhetoric about following science which is necessary but if you think about it, science isn’t really giving the answer but it’s giving indications and predictions about the way something will behave. It also helps assess the impact of that behavior. 

Science gives us a whole load of indicators about what might happen, but the art can show us whether this has been executed well or not. The art is the decisions that are made about how to react to the science and the indications and the variables that have been provided by science and look at those scenarios.

To summarise

It’s the blend of science associated with bringing data together, with unpicking the trends, creating predictions with the art of leadership, and decision-making, that really helps positive outcomes. It’s more important than ever that we keep in mind that we need both sides of this really valuable equation of bringing science, algorithms, predictions, technology, statistics to the table alongside with this art of leadership of influence of communication and creativity outside of what we need to do.

Listen to this episode of Hub & Spoken