Absent of imagination, data workers perform at best on par with intelligent agents, finding associations but failing in causality. Identifying causal links requires thinking in counterfactuals, which, in turn, requires imagining what could have been.
What is absent must be imagined while what is present remains obvious, even to an algorithm. Data centric companies should invest at least as much in the thinking skills and imaginative ability as in the coding skills of their data workers for value creation.