What You See Is Not Necessarily What Is Real

By Al Weber, President, Tweed-Weber, Inc.


Less than two years ago, two events coincided to deliver a learning point that might be worth sharing.

At a planning meeting for a pretty sophisticated manufacturing company, someone made an off-hand comment about the local library. The CEO of the company, a guy who is well educated and extremely good at what he does, was instantly dismissive. “Libraries,” he said, “who uses them anymore? With the Internet almost everywhere, who needs a library?”

Knowing a little bit about libraries, I responded almost immediately. “Let’s start with tens of millions of people every day and work up from there” was my reply. The CEO was surprised, you could even say shocked, to learn there was still an essential need for libraries in this time where the Internet was “almost everywhere.” We took a short diversion from the agenda of the meeting and discussed the continually evolving role of libraries in today’s diverse world. We talked about the fact that many millions of people use the library to access the very Internet he wrongly assumed came to everyone like it came to him. We talked about the role of libraries educating children and adults, providing paper and electronic books to those who love to read, serving as a “third-place” for people looking for a neutral location to meet up with friends, and delivering non-book resources such as CDs and DVDs to people without other access to them.

At one point, he declared defeat on the point saying, “I guess because I don’t use a library, I just never saw that.” The point here is that what he saw (no current need for libraries) was not real.

Less than a few weeks later, I was rolling out the results of a patron survey to the management team of a library system in Pennsylvania. As we walked through the demographics of the respondents, I reported that their patrons were: more married, better educated, and wealthier than the overall population of the county they served. And, in a statistic that was just dripping with irony, given my CEO’s earlier comments, they were extremely well connected to the Internet. This conclusion was based on the fact that 94% of the respondents had completed the survey from their homes.

One of the key library managers, who was well educated and extremely good at her job, instantly rejected the sample (and its resulting conclusions) saying it was not representative of the people who use her library. Knowing a little bit about sampling, I explained that with 848 respondents we could report the data at a 99% confidence interval, +/- 4% error rate. She could deny the results of the survey all she wanted but if the system were to repeat the survey 100 more times, in 99 of those 100 surveys the results would be the same, plus or minus four percent. Her follow up comment was, “Well, we don’t see those people in our libraries, that’s for sure.” That may very well be, I responded but the respondents felt strongly enough about their library to take the time and complete a survey that I would hardly call “short.”

Further discussion concluded the people they actually recalled seeing in the library were a relatively small number of “frequent flyers.” They were voracious readers who appeared regularly to pick out new books. They were people without a computer in their home who used the technology in the library to check email and search for jobs. They were students who gathered with their friends after school in a place they found safe and fun. They were retirees who came in almost daily to read the newspapers and magazines. They were folks who came in out of the cold or heat to get warm or cool off in the library.

At one point, she declared defeat saying, “I guess I just don’t see those married, educated, affluent people as much because they are not here as regularly.” The point here is that what she saw (her library regulars) was not reflective of all of her patrons, but rather a very small subset of them.

People who lead organizations regularly have to make decisions about and set direction for those organizations. It is easy, and dangerous, to make those decisions and set direction based on individual impressions, opinions, and anecdotes. Good data, whether secondary data from public sources, or primary data from research like the patron survey referenced above, can help you make better decisions based on what is real, not just what you see or hear. In the end, the cost of gathering this data is much less expensive than the price you'll pay for a less-than-good decision.