Key facts

  • Data anxiety is common and affects many organisations.
  • Data anxiety is hard to diagnose because it often looks similar to more general performance management issues.
  • We show you four red flags for diagnosing data anxiety in your organisation.

What causes data anxiety?

People in tech are talking about a new term - “data anxiety”. But what do they mean? Data anxiety includes big, scary issues like data security and privacy. But data anxiety is also caused by subtle, insidious threats:

  • Your data is being collected in all the wrong ways;
  • Your analyses have missed the mark;
  • You are hoarding data without making good use of it, and causing a resource drain.

For an organisation, data anxiety translates to mistrust in analyses, difficulty making decisions, and resistance to change. Your once streamlined, take-no-prisoners executive team is now infighting, playing politics, and hand-wringing over every presentation, marking it ‘need to know’.

In short, data anxiety paralyses your business.

Although highly effective strategies exist to reduce data anxiety, very few organisations or people use them. Because the symptoms of data anxiety show themselves differently in every organisation, it is difficult to understand the impact it is having. With no obvious reason for the breakdown in executive decision-making, organisations grind on, becoming ever slower and less effective.

Have you seen any of these lately:

1. Declining confidence in your executive team

Confidence in executive leadership dropped last year across all categories, to the point that less than a third of leaders trust their senior leadership.

Declining confidence in the executive team is commonly answered with finger-pointing about job roles, hand-wringing about the effects of the pandemic, and navel-gazing about the potential threats from AI.

But let me offer you an alternative explanation, one that you can actually do something about:

Your team is anxious. Specifically, they are anxious about data. This anxiety is preventing them from making decisions and from acting effectively.

According to scientists, data anxiety prevents people and organisations from making improvements or breaking with past inefficiencies. In short, data anxiety prevents us from fixing things, including our own data anxiety.

Have you seen these other signs?

2. An organisational culture of secrecy

Presentations are not shared widely and are placed under secrecy embargoes. Information is held closely to people’s chests. Your executives spend more and more time on politics trying to ensure they get a place in important meetings where privileged information will be shared. People are afraid to present, and even more afraid to make decisions, because they feel any debate or response to their ideas will come at them as petty critiques of their data or their analyses. Discussions tend to devolve into bickering over technicalities, rather than focusing on strategies and solutions.

Organisational data anxiety leads to an organisational culture of secrecy. Worried about the accuracy of their data, people stop putting clear numbers on their communications, leaving themselves a getaway by not writing down anything too specific. But this leads to fuzziness in communication and provides room for “spin” to take the place of facts and figures.

3. Investor calls are stressful

Market shocks - inflation, share prices falling, lower profits - mean more questions from investors about how your business creates value. Often, investors want to know hard numbers - hyper-specific, easy to check, and highly likely to damage your reputation if you’re wrong.

Picture your investor, drumming their fingers on the desk, a furrowed brow casting shadows over hopeful eyes as they await that crucial piece of information. Can you hear the tick-tock of the clock?

Say goodbye to the image you’ve so carefully curated of your team’s efficiency. If you’re lucky, by the time you find the answer, the investor has moved on entirely to something else. If you’re unlucky, so has their funding.

4. Strategy meetings are long and difficult

It’s time for another leadership meeting, and everyone has flown in from regional offices to really ‘knock over some items’. Your team drags in an endless chain of analysts that present earnest slide decks about topics that seem important, but never make you feel like you are ahead of the game. One presentation is counter-intuitive or controversial, and suddenly your executives are stuck in an argument that lasts forever and makes everyone feel sad. You all leave the room, determining to increase the frequency of leadership meetings to ensure everyone gets aligned.

But alignment doesn’t come from a meeting, it comes from vision and metrics, and you can’t adjust your vision if your metrics are in question. An executive with one watch might always be late, but the executive with two watches is never sure.

It might seem like a lot of investment to get your data correct, but it will pay itself back in a single leadership meeting. If there is no data anxiety, then leadership can move on from discussing the numbers and start talking about decisions and strategy.

If you are interested in AI tools for improving confidence in your data, check out our Laboratory - a beta tool we’re working on to help the community improve its data health and data confidence.

Jac Davis and Jegar Pitchforth are data science consultants with a shared 15 years experience in data science. We’ll be following up with a series of investigations into data anxiety and data leadership. If you’re interested, follow along to see posts on: strategies that excellent teams use to make data decisions, why performance reviews aren’t fixing your data problem, risk factors for a data anxious organisation, and treatments for data anxiety.