The following is an excerpt from a Business Review piece that interviewed the author ofData Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset(Links to an external site.), Tom Redman:

"First, don't tell your data analyst to go out and figure out what is predicting sales. "The way most analyses go haywire is the manager hasn't narrowed the focus on what he or she is looking for," says Redman. It's your job to identify the factors that you suspect are having an impact and ask your analyst to look at those. "If you tell a data scientist to go on a fishing expedition, or to tell you something you don't know, then you deserve what you get, which is bad analysis," he says. In other words, don't ask your analysts to look at every variable they can possibly get their hands on all at once. If you do, you're likely to find relationships that don't really exist. It's the same principle as flipping a coin: do it enough times, you'll eventuallythinkyou see something interesting, like a bunch of heads all in a row."

Have you ever been guilty of finding relationships between variables that don't actually exist out in the "real world" simply by trying to fish for anything to make sense of a situation, whether personal, professional or otherwise? Please explain.

If you can't think of a time when this was the case for you, consider a hypothetical situation like this. What might it look like?