Technical Chinese: KPI and anecdotal evidence

KPI, Noun, masculineIt is as dangerous and effective as it sounds, the KPI. It haunts management presentations like a ghost, down to the marketing departments and over to the agencies. It spreads fear and terror like the KGB, the Committee for State Security in Russia. However, KPI does not stand for committee, but for key, P for performance and I for indicator. In German: Leistungskennzahl. We live in an age of quantifiability, our ideology is comparability, and data collection is the church that even atheists get into. No wonder, then, that there are not only business performance indicators for companies, but also a key performance indicator for projects, processes or developments. The Key Performance Indicator is used for planning security. Those who demand it want to hedge their bets, those who have to meet them tremble. It doesn't matter whether it's for productivity enhancement projects, business-relevant strategy changes or campaign performance measurements: Only the KPI proves success! And since every department, every agency, every person in charge has his or her own KPI, it can happen that a division manager optimizes project KPIs to the detriment of other corporate goals and thus harms the company. This in turn can lead to a knee-jerk reaction or denunciation, which brings us back to the secret service. Unlike the KGB, however, which usually works covertly, the KPI is currently the center of attention everywhere and mercilessly cleans up everything that does not perform measurably.Anecdotal Evidence, Adjective and noun, feminineWhich do you believe more - a clear number or a good story? Probably the number. But which do you prefer to hear? It's one of the great disputes in the creative industry: numbers are more compelling, but more boring - stories more inaccurate, but more entertaining.An evidence is an empirical proof. An anecdotal evidence is evidence based on observations (or just: anecdotes). The problem with anecdotal evidence is that you draw conclusions that may be based on false assumptions. The most famous example is the "black swan": Due to the fact that we observe only white swans at a lake, we cannot exclude that there are not also black swans. Anecdotes are not always provable, but nevertheless (or exactly therefore?) have great persuasive power. In surveys, we are nowadays again doing more qualitative individual interviews, which produce a kind of sum of anecdotal evidence, than quantitative mass surveys. In presentations, it is becoming increasingly important to provide stories and case studies (best cases, best practice) in addition to data. These make it credible that a project or concept is justified, especially when little or no data is available because it is a new idea. It is a paradox, because a belief in numbers can lead to rigidity of thought, and a belief in anecdotes can lead to illusions. The higher up in management, the fewer women, but the more anecdotal evidence. Because the greater the empirically provable trust in a person, the better the anecdotal evidence works.