If we stopped here things might look bad for our data-rich future, but it’s not hopeless. Here are three ways you can approach data that will enrich your creativity and enable you to use the information you get in very powerful ways.

I work in a group that creates things that may be used by half a billion people. I manage the data science team for that group and we are increasingly getting requests for more data about our business.

See, data is meaningless only if we are expecting objective truth from it without factoring in our perceptions and assumptions and getting past those with our creativity. What I mean by creativity in this context is the process of asking questions and experimenting.Creativity allows us to take the data we have, question our starting assumptions about what the data is telling us, and experiment until we make something useful out of it.The title of this article is about not being data driven, with “driven” being the key word.

The idea here is that we should use data as information, not as insight. Put another way, it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the cook. Ingredients alone don’t make a meal (at least, not a good one). And even great recipes don’t come without a lot of experimentation and failed attempts by the people who create them. In the same way, the human part of the data pipeline is the most valuable part, and this is especially true for those of us in creative or innovative fields. For data to support truly creative or innovative outcomes, we must allow it to inform us of the facts so we can ask questions and experiment with the “adjacent possible” to discover the insights and potential that the raw data doesn’t provide. This is true for the following reasons:

Experimentation leaves many possibilities open

Experimenters expect, and even celebrate, failure and uncertainty

Experimentation keeps the process open to change and adaptable to discoveries

Experimentation is a bit of a cold, clinical word, but you could also use the words exploration or even play. Experimentation supports the idea that there are no preconceived outcomes, leaving open many possible results. For this to happen, we have to start with the idea that “success” can come in many forms, or even no form at all. That means when you improvise with the recipe you may completely fail at making a dish you want to eat, or you may invent a whole new cuisine!