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No-one in business has enough time. Buyers of research are deluged with presentations; with ‘big data’ promising more information and even more material to ingest. We live in a DRIP world – ‘data rich, insight poor’.

The industries that are responsible for generating information, knowledge and insight are still churning out what I call ‘data freighters’ – super-tankers of often undigested, and indigestible, material. We all instinctively know this is compounding the problem for the precious, but over-taxed, attentional resources of ever-demanding clients. How did we allow this to happen and, more importantly, how can we turn back the data freighters?

A large part of the problem is ‘arithmocracy’ – a system based on the worship of numbers as gods, and an unshakeable, if unproven, belief in safety in numbers.

We see it encroaching across much of our lives: school league tables, goals for NHS waiting times, and police crime-rate targets, to mention but a few. In our world, ...