Linked: McKinsey Digital Says Covid-19 Has Revealed The Achilles’ Heel Of Analytics
It’s the same Achilles heel of any predictive model. What to do with something completely new?
““While analytics has helped many businesses to navigate the crisis, it has also shown fallibility,” said Saleh. “As a technology that relies on the details of past patterns and behaviors to predict what will happen next and what action a business ought to take, Covid-19 has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works, given this predictive model is no longer effective, with the pandemic having transformed the way we live, and work.””
It’s not just that COVID-19 presented us with something we’ve not seen before and therefore made it harder to predict how people would respond. It’s also that the way people have responded has now changed a whole lot of things going forward in ways that didn’t exist a year ago.
Remote work worked for a lot of companies, and that changes what they might do going forward, which has deep impacts on office workplaces, real estate, etc. We also saw how many of the people around us reacted, and in many cases, now have a deep distrust of each other that wasn’t there before. This changes how we will act going forward.
There’s no way to know just how much of an impact all of these changes have had on us individually and as a society, and thus, there’s not much analytics can tell us about how we will act in the future. What we did before is no longer applicable. The world changed.
There are no models to predict that.
