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-Fullerton, Loyola Marymount University, and the University of California-Irvine’s Merage School of Business.
With empathy at its core, Rehumanize is a brand growth system modeled on the four dynamics of human relationships. Its “4Es” framework connects insights, goals, tactics, data and enterprise-wide collaboration to form a human-centered growth strategy.
