Page 220 - Ray Dalio - Principles

e. Don’t oversqueeze dots. A dot is just one piece of data from one
moment in time; keep that in perspective as you synthesize. Just as
you need to sort big from small, and what’s happening in the
moment from overall patterns, you need to know how much learning
you can get out of any one dot without overweighing it.

5.3 Synthesize the situation through time.

To see how the dots connect through time you must collect, analyze,
and sort different types of information, which isn’t easy. For
example, let’s imagine a day in which eight outcomes occur. Some
are good, some bad. Let’s illustrate this day as shown, with each
type of event represented by a letter and the quality of the outcome
represented by its height.

In order to see the day this way, you must categorize outcomes by
type (signified by letters) and quality (the higher up the graph, the
better), which will require synthesizing a by-and-large assessment of
each. (To make the example more concrete, imagine you’re running
an ice cream shop and the W’s represent sales, the X’s represent
customer experience ratings, the Y’s represent press and reviews, the
Z’s represent staff engagement, etc.) Keep in mind that our example
is a relatively simple one: just eight occurrences over one day.

From the chart on the right, you can see that it was a great day for
sales (because the W’s are at the top) and a bad day for customer
experience (the X’s). You might conjecture why—maybe a crowd
generated sales but produced long lines.