Information is beautiful, but so is misinformation
Handle with care – that's the warning from Tim Harford, the Financial Times's award-winning 'undercover economist', to all those who dare to dabble in data.
Harford was speaking at the RBS SE100 Index awards ceremony, which saw three high-achieving social enterprises, Patchwork People, P3 and Right Track, named this year's winners.
He began with the story of Archie Cochrane, the father of evidence-based medicine, whose inconvenient trials and pesky facts revealed that hospitals treating patients recovering from cardiac arrests were indirectly killing them. Evidence demonstrated they were better off recovering at home.
"When we use data responsibly it can be incredible," he said. Sport scientist Matthew Parker was Harford's case in point. By identifying the golden hour – the recovery time between cycling semi-finals and the final, he was able to identify what cyclists need to eat, drink and do to maximise their performance in the final. As a result, British cyclists today are consistently faster in the final than semi-final, and proving their ability to win Olympic gold medals.
"This is what happens when the power of data is relentlessly applied to our organisations, showing us what we should to do achieve a higher impact and more success," he said.
But Harford warned against dazzle camouflage donned by ships during World War I. Complex patterns of geometric shapes painted onto the vessels meant enemy torpedoes had little chance of hitting their target – an ingenious feat of misdirection. "Information is beautiful," he told Pioneers Post, "But so is misinformation."
Christian Nolle, the developer behind the new, live RBS SE100 Index website, shed some light on the number-crunching behind the platform. It's in flux, he explained, "the index recalculates every second."
After four years in existence with support from RBS, the index now contains basic data on more than 3,500 social enterprises, along with more detailed financial data for more than 1,000 of them.
"As the data set grows, there is more to draw from and it becomes increasingly accurate," Nolle told Pioneers Post.
"Start-ups have infinite growth, so we have a separate ranking for businesses three years old and under, and use this data to select the trailblazing newcomer, they don't feed into statistics around the overall growth of the sector," he said.
Alongside awards presented to social enterprise growth champion Right Track, impact champion P3 and trailblazing newcomer, Patchwork People, it was announced that the social enterprises on the index for which there are two years of data have grown by 82% on average over the past year, reaching a total turnover of £11.3bn.
