Divination-Driven Decision-Making

I've been reading a lot about ancient Mesopotamia. Over the winter I read Weavers, Scribes and Kings, a book about Cuneiform, and what we know about the people who used it — both directly from the words we wrote, as well as the "metadata" of where we find tablets. For instance, we know quite about about how people learned to write, and how schools for scribes were organized, not because anyone wrote about the process and the schools directly but because we've been able to find collections of practice tablets. (Helpfully, cuneiform was written on clay tablets— so when a building burnt down we're able to get a lot of information about works that might otherwise have been erased and repurposed.)

The book is really interested in helping you understand the mindset of these ancient people. For example: The way they conceived of the gods, as both human-like beings in charge of natural phenomenon — beings with a physical location and physical needs — and in some way also literally those natural phenomena. This is a different kind of thing than what we tend to call "god" today, and what we call their "religion" was a different kind of thing than the religions we practice today. The book explains:

Think of it this way: people could see causes and effects in the things they themselves did every day; a human could plant crops in a field, tear down a house, or eat a meal. The outcomes of these actions were obvious—plants grew, walls fell, hunger was satiated. So, something, or someone, must be causing the phenomena that humans didn’t control, and it was clear that this someone (or someones) lived longer than any human and had vastly more power.

Partly as a consequence of this view of the gods, these people were absolutely mad for divination. Partially this impression is an artifact of the way they did divination, which caused them to write a lot of it down. The will of the gods left patterns in the world. They would take a medium — animal entrails, cedar smoke, oil or flour poured on water — and read the shapes in it, and then interpret the shapes. Once they'd made a reading they'd write it down, along with the basis of the reading, so that future diviners could consult it when making a reading in the future.

Kings (and other leaders) consulted diviners constantly. Should I go to war? Should I go to war at this time, and in this way? Will my conspiracy to depose the king succeed? Kings prided themselves on faithfully adhering to the will of the gods, as told to them through what— to modern eyes — is obviously a combination of a random number generator and cold reading.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the way that modern managers talk about being "data-driven." I can imagine these ancient kings describing themselves as "divination-driven" leaders. Compare how the Harvard Business School describes the benefits of "data-driven" decision-making.

You'll Make More Confident Decisions

You'll Become More Proactive

You Can Realize Cost Savings

And how do we become more data-driven?

Look for Patterns Everywhere

Tie Every Decision Back to the Data

Visualize the Meaning Behind the Data

I particularly enjoy this line:

Whether you’re in the office poring over financial statements, standing in line at the grocery store, or commuting on the train, look for patterns in the data around you.

The gods leave messages everywhere!

I'm being a little bit facetious here, because data can be used to make "better" decisions than you would without it. "Actually going and looking" is a pretty neat technique, and "looking" at large systems requires numbers.

But look at what HBS positions as the number one reason to use data: Confidence. The most important feature isn't the quality of the decision, or the outcome of the decision. It's how leaders feel about the decision. We're not actually that far from pouring oil into a bowl of water to decide whether to go to war.