rehumanize

The Big Short is more than a story about the 2007 mortgage crisis - it’s a cautionary tale about the peril of not understanding the human context behind data.   Mark Baum, the investor played by Steve Carell, had his team gather first-hand insights to uncover what the raw data was hiding from others. They went out and talked to people on the front lines — the shady mortgage brokers; the compromised ratings agencies; the “nightclub” worker who owned five homes; the father who had dutifully paid his bill yet was about to lose his home — before deciding to short the Collateralized Debt Obligations that would soon turn toxic.  They invested the time to understand the human context — behaviors, motivations, beliefs. What purely data-derived assumptions do we have about customers.   Do we understand how they feel and why they do what they do?   This is the question I’ll be posing to students as I share the Rehumanize platform during my upcoming university lectures at California State-Fuller