Ratings… indicators… categories – whatever the name, we use them to help us make sense of too much data. We use them to solve the problem presented in the question: Where or with whom do I get started? They help us navigate the world. But they can also limit our world – and our ability to feed the prospect pipelines of the future.
As human beings we like – and need – to categorize people. We might choose to categorize by gender, skin color, nationality, ethnicity, zip code, or even by hobbies (I used to refer to the trout-fishing people that seasonally descended on my tiny neighborhood in Pennsylvania as “fisher-people”).
But as we all know, this categorizing, or profiling, can lead to a limiting bias. For example, hiding within wealthy zip codes are families struggling to make ends meet. That’s why prospect research professionals verify wealth screenings and evaluate prospects individually. We need to generalize and categorize, but we balance that by recognizing each person as an individual.
In his book, Big Good: Philanthropy in the Age of Big Data & Cognitive Computing, David Lawson tells us to prepare for resistance. Resistance against using a new technology. Resistance against ratings. Resistance against change.
With AI or cognitive computing, ratings can be sliced and diced using ever more data. Cognitive computing can reveal new perspectives and new ratings using computing power that is much better at detecting and interpreting patterns than our human brains ever will be.
But how can we trust ratings we can’t understand?
When I interviewed David in the Prospect Research #ChatBytes podcast, he conceded that if we ask the machine a biased question or feed the machine biased data sets, we will get biased results. But he also pointed out that we can leverage the power of cognitive computing to strip out known biases.
We can ask a program to include or exclude a variable such as age, gender, or zip code. And with this new powerful program that David has nicknamed our “cognitive colleague,” we can reveal new opportunities. And what do we know about new opportunities and new ideas? People will resist them!
Nevertheless, it remains our responsibility as development officers and researchers to navigate this resistance. To steer our organizations into the future we must introduce and manage our new cognitive colleague, and translate and present its findings in a way that can be understood, related to, and acted upon.
But don’t listen to me! Jump over to the podcast and listen to David yourself. He’s quite entertaining and full of visionary ideas. Even better, attend the AASP Summit in Chicago where you can hear David and Lori Lawson live, delivering the keynote presentation (Nov 14-16, 2018).