For the past decade, Big Data has evoked expectations akin to discovering a promised land for businesses. The expectation of a fantastic hotline that allows you to instantly check the habits, desires, and needs of your target customers.

In May 2011,a special research reportfrom McKinsey, a management consulting firm, argued that "Big Data will be the core foundation of future business competition, supporting new streams of productivity gains, innovation, and consumer surplus." Around the same time, a subsequent report by IBM highlighted that 90% of the world's information at the time was generated in the past two years, indicating a significant amount of data being generated daily.

However, the results of theNewVantage Partners 2020 Big Data & Executive Surveyreleased in 2021 reveal a present reality that diverges from initial expectations. This survey polled 1,000 executives from Fortune companies who are responsible for and oversee data initiatives within their organizations.

• Only 26.8% of companies have established a data-culture.
• Only 37.8% of companies reported being data-driven.
• Only 45.1 companies are currently competing in the data and analytics field.

Of course, there are definite examples of Data mining for Customer Intelligence making Netflix and Amazon shareholders happy, which is worth noting.

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However, despite the massive increase in data volume and the success of some companies, most businesses find it difficult to gain deep insights through it, as initially expected. Ultimately,data analysis is merely a tool. When we use such data analysis as a strategy, we make assumptions about people and their behavior.

Assumptions that are wrong and irrelevant to people's real world.

In other words, Big Data itself causes businesses to misunderstand people.

First, Big Data brings about Thin Data. In the field of social sciences, data that understands human behavior is broadly categorized into two types. Of these, Thin Data is primarily derived from people's digital footprints. For instance, this includes explicit information like her wearing size 44, having brown eyes, and drinking Pinot Noir wine.

The other, Thick Data, offers insight into how people actually experience the world. For example, she could smell the grass after the rain, viewed him as someone special while walking together, and the sneakers she was wearing made her footsteps appear lighter; this isinformation rich in meaning.

In essence, Big Data focuses on correlations associated with products but has no interest in causality within everyday life. However,understanding human behavior as a social being is at the core of causality. If there is no insight into the actual thoughts and feelings of customers, Thin Data by itself is bound to have limited meaning and utility. According to Accenture's Analytics in Action report, only 20% of organizations that claim to have excellent performance management capabilities have "found proven causality between what they measure and what they drive." This is evidence that algorithm-centric companies have lost the ability to understand human behavior.

Most importantly, Big Data cannot reveal the strategic value-bearing patterns within it without critical thinking skills. Here, critical thinking refers to the process of comparing and evaluating situations against objective evidence, clarifying'causality', and acting based on judgments made from this. This can be explained by the need for companies to cultivate their management's ability to correctly interpret human behavior.

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The greatest type of human interpretive thinking comes from the field of social sciences.

History, literature, philosophy, and anthropology, which have spanned 2,000 years, have taught us the critical thinking skills necessary for humans to understand each other correctly. Understanding human behavior at a deeper level enables us to comprehend and explain the rapid changes in customer behavior. And it is from there that we can discover possibilities for innovation.

Ultimately, if we can find the answer to Why, companies can gain their own valuable perspective from the current Big Data movement that has been nothing but a flurry of noise. And that company will become the only entity that truly understands people.