In the company where my sister works, a director heard that customers sometimes were not happy with the delivery time. To investigate this, a group was formed to create a survey. The draft survey was sent to each department manager. Each manager was able to add at most 10 questions to the survey. It was decided that each answer should contain a mandatory text field, where the customer should enter an explanation for his answer. In addition, multiple-choice answers were allowed. The average number of choices for each question was 17.2.
A few months later, the survey was ready to go out to customers. The return rate was an unfortunate low 2%, but luckily the group managed to get enough material out of each response to compile a report with 400 pages. The summary conclusion was 87 pages, according to people who claim to have read that far.
When management saw the report, they were very proud of the result and archived it for future use, once they had time to analyse the material.
That is, they archived everything that was stored electronically. Part of the report was an appendix written by hand in a paper notebook. It was the result of a janitor, who used to ask customers who came to the building "Are you happy with our delivery times?" He wrote the answers down in his notebook. 98% answered "no". 2% answered "yes".
That paper was thrown away.
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