I crossed my arms and everyone knew what it meant

"What do you see?"

I stood on a podium, in front of fifty or so people. I was dressed in beige chinos, white buttoned shirt, and navy blue blazer. My feet were shoulder width apart, and I crossed my arms, tucking my palms under the armpits. Natural light coming from the windows on the east side illuminated me, while other sides were wood panelled walls.

People in the audience called out some of the above, but most were focused on me and my posture.

"And what does it mean?"

Some spoke about demonstrating a defensive posture, others about power posing, and yet others about how I am trying to make a point that is about to come.

"What have we observed?" and "What does it mean?" are the two most important questions when learning from business experiments.

Observations are data, numbers, and similar; descriptions of what transpired; bereft of interpretations as much as possible.

Interpreting and analysing the observations, making sense of them, and understanding how they are significant to our goal, must be a separate process, even if artificially.

There is a third layer too, and that is understanding how do we come to interpret the data, why are we drawing the conclusions we are drawing, and why in the way we are.

All of the above are in the service of making an informed decision and creating reusable knowledge. It is the latter that benefits from paying attention to separating observations from interpretations, allowing us to revisit past experiments to discover more valuable opportunities.

So, next time you sit down to make sense of a business experiment you had just run remember to separate observation, interpretation, and determination phases.

P.S. You might be interested in an extensive guide for designing, running, and learning from business experiments I have written. Read it here.