Organizational epistemology. Or: How do we know stuff?

Tristan Handy

Tristan has been working in data for two decades, in both in-house and consulting roles, with both large enterprises and small startups.

For over a decade, technologists thought that the hard thing about harnessing the exploding amount of data would be about technology: how to store it all, how to process it all, how to analyze it all. Turns out that’s not the hard part. Just as in the wider world, organizations are going through an epistemic crisis: they’re having a hard time knowing what is true and what is false.

Most organizations might not have flat-earthers, fake news, and state-sponsored Twitter bots conducting information warfare, but their challenges determining what’s true are just as existential. Solving them will require good tooling, but even moreso will require a set of core values and supporting cultural norms. What does that future look like?