Plato, Democracy, and the Data Delusion

There’s a story from Plato that I keep coming back to. I first read it years ago when I was just starting out my career and the more time I spend around data and decision-making, the more relevant it feels.

Plato believed that democracy had some serious flaws, which certainly surprised me at first. We’re taught to think of democracy as the ultimate political system, because it embodies fairness; one person, one vote. However, Plato worried that if everyone had an equal say, it wouldn’t be long before the loudest voices began to dominate the discourse.

In The Republic, he used a metaphor of a ship at sea to convey his argument. In which he describes a crew where everyone believes they’re qualified to captain, but the person who actually understands navigation is ignored. They spoke too carefully, doubted themselves, or asked difficult questions no one wanted to hear.

When Everyone Gets a Dashboard

We’re living through what a lot of people call the era of data democratisation. In theory, it’s a powerful idea: anyone in a company, from the C-suite to the front line, can access the same data, ask their own questions, and draw their own conclusions.

No more centralised data teams creating bottlenecks, or SME gatekeepers. Everyone empowered to make smarter decisions. Except, unfortunately, it’s not really that simple.

This is because access to data doesn’t automatically come with the skills, or the mindset, to interpret it well. Even the most well-meaning dashboards can become tools for confirmation bias. We cherry-pick metrics, misread context and even chase numbers that look good in the short term but can undermine the long term. This is all natural human behaviour.

The Illusion of Empowerment

One of the reasons Plato distrusted democracy was because he believed it gave people the illusion of wisdom. I’ve seen dashboards, and even increased access to technology, do the same thing. Surely, we have all heard someone in the office jokingly say they, “know just enough to be dangerous”.

We build sleek reports with slicers, KPIs, and fancy visuals. We make the user feel in control. Which is great to a point, but control isn’t the same as understanding and having access to the data isn’t the same as knowing how to reason with it.

In a way, we’ve replaced the old gatekeepers with a new problem: unguided autonomy. Where everyone has the ability to interrogate the data and draw their own conclusions, without necessarily having a firm grasp on the potential pitfalls. For example, how a metrics meaning might change when combined with dimensions it was not originally designed to be sliced by.

We’ve democratised the data but with some guidance we can begin to democratise the thinking.

Not Everyone Needs to Be a Philosopher

I’m not saying only experts should touch dashboards, or that we need to make data more exclusive again. That’s not the point. I am saying that if we want data democratisation to work, we need to pair it with something deeper: a culture of reasoning.

This kind of culture would teach people to ask better questions and would encourage them to consider context. Possibly even more importantly, to be okay with uncertainty and complexity. It would even propose the idea that sometimes the most useful thing a dashboard can do is not give a definitive answer but show us where our thinking might be too simple.

What Plato Might Say About BI

If Plato was asked for his critique on modern BI, I’m sure he would be impressed by the tools, the visuals, or interactivity. We’ve come a long way from clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. However, I reckon he’d have questions too. Such as:

·       Who decided what counts as “performance” in this dashboard?

·       What are we optimising for? And who benefits from that definition?

·       Have we trained our decision-makers to be navigators? Or just passengers who trust the dashboard to steer?

These are questions most BI teams would ask once, if at all, during the design or discovery phase of a dashboard build. However, once everything is complete the questioning generally stops. Even as the business evolves, the metrics and measures of success can remain static. Plato would have us revisit these questions time and time again.

A Culture Shift, Not Just a Toolset

We’ve come a long way in making data accessible, which is worth celebrating for sure.

Where we go next in terms of this data evolution is about interpretation. It’s about cultivating the kind of organisational intelligence that can handle complexity without retreating into simplification. The kind that can recognise when a confident number needs to be challenged. The kind that welcomes healthy disagreement, and sees curiosity not as a distraction, but as a sign of strength.

That’s what Plato would have wanted: not rule by experts, but rule by people who had trained themselves to think deeply and act wisely.

And that’s what I think BI can become, not just a way of measuring the world, but a way of reasoning through it.