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The Tool: Gathering Data
What It Is?

Sometimes we can't make sense of someone from meeting them and reading them directly, and we can't get a sense of a distinct personality. And time is getting short. In such cases we have to take a wholly different kind of action: gathering hard or soft data about the subject.

This doesn't mean that we have to become detectives. We just need to match the scope of the data gathering to the importance of the situation or the potential risk involved. If we're going on a date, no need to call the CIA! A simple Google search and perhaps a couple of calls to people who have known the man or woman in question will suffice. On the other hand, if we're thinking of marrying someone, or committing significant amounts of money to a project, or becoming long-term business partners with someone, we should consider spending time and money on an appropriate “due diligence” investigation.

In the context of making relationship decisions, data gathering refers to the craft of finding objective or subjective information relevant to the specific question being asked, e.g. "should I leave him," "stay with her," "get serious," " call the cops," "handle him/her in some particular way," etc. If psychological approaches don't deliver the answer after reasonable consideration, we may need some objective, hard data to provide the insight we're looking for. It might tell us what someone has been doing, where they've been, or how they've lived their lives, and therefore help to answer to our question.

This hard data is the stuff of TV drama. However, more often it's soft data we're looking for. What does the data say about what this guy really like? Does his track record with people show he's trust-worthy? How does he handle relationships? Such questions often can't be answered by database searches, or in fact anything that’s been written down. The information has to come from people.
 
Why Is It Important?
It’s all very well to read people “face to face” and define them in personality terms, but many times even the most sophisticated of these approaches amount to useless wheel spinning. If cues, clues, and psychological inference yield nothing, we have to change our method, and see what objective data yields.

With the exception of business, there is no particular type of person or situation for which this outside-in approach is particularly useful. It's especially suited for business executives because they are trained to give nothing away by bearing or cues, and they often appear personally unremarkable in the office context. The whole point is to gain advantage by maintaining a facade. We may “type” that person in certain ways, but usually this adds little; he or she is acting from a rational plan, not irrationality, whim, or personality quirk. So what can we do?

The answer is that we can focus on style and track record, which are the best predictor of future behavior. We can gather information on the way the person has conducted himself over the years, whether or not there is an extensive professional track record. This business style analysis is the best single predictor of future conduct. The executive’s style tends to be fairly consistent, except in the case of a few cagey business people, and some people outside of that world, who purposely develop an unpredictable style to throw off pursuers. Those people understand that knowledge of them can sometimes be translated into business advantage.
 
How Do We Use It?
The simplest, and overall the most useful way of gathering data is to call people on the telephone or meet them and ask them about the subject. This is why intelligence agents attend cocktail parties! Simple conversations are especially useful for gathering the kind of “soft” data critical to good relationships. My wife has done this half a dozen times in the last year, in looking for honest, easy to work with service providers for our home and family. Such data gathering maximizes the probability of getting good people, and is well worth the effort.

We all tend to gather data by such means naturally, though usually in a fairly incoherent way. We often confuse it with gossip, to which it is only vaguely similar. This work looks easy in the movies and television shows. In reality it takes awareness and training. People in certain professions, e.g. real estate, tend to be exceptional in this area. Most of us, and especially men, may find it embarrassing and anxiety-provoking, at least initially. Women have a far better natural ability in this area, and are more comfortable doing this evaluative networking, though with training there is no reason men can't equal them.

We may at first feel clumsy and vaguely immoral, going from one person to another and teasing information and recollection out of them. But if we want to understand someone’s roots and tendencies, there is no other way.

Serious information searches should be reserved for situations in which we're making major, leveraged decisions. When our happiness, our bank accounts, and even our lives are on the line, it is our duty to ourselves to maximize the probability that we'll make the right decision. It is simply too important to leave to chance, whim, fate, or a simple “people read” in the ordinary sense. Police and cab drivers don't have the luxury of increasing their chances of survival by gathering more data. Believe me, they wish they did!

The two ways to gather objective data about people are information searches (free and paid), and physical searches through records of various sorts. Free internet searches begin with Google and secondary search engines, some of which search the so-called “hidden web.” Lexis/Nexis and other paid search engines add another level of sophistication. Specialists can find information when nothing appears to be available. Sometimes, this is enough to provide provisional answers to the criterion question.

Google and other search engines have a long memory, having taken “snapshots” of billions of web pages that they've stored for historical purposes. Nevertheless, executives and other individuals who want to remain opaque to others actively and often successfully petition the search engines to remove information about them.

Paid searches via specialist “data mining” companies can provide the best yield. Choicepoint and other companies sell personal information, for increasingly high prices depending on the level of detail and security that must be breached. Though this information is supposedly unavailable to those without a legal and professional need to know, usually these barriers can be overcome, except for the most secure, “government grade” levels.

Sometimes old-fashioned, “non-virtual” data gathering is needed. This means in practice that one has to find facts in painstaking fashion, one clue and one visit to some town or city office at a time. Perhaps this will change as more data goes online, but at present it cannot be avoided, especially as people increasingly cover their tracks.
 


Copyright © 2005 Richard Pomerance