Making Data-Driven Gut Decisions
Eccella helps companies become data-driven so that they can rely on information processing for better decision-making. In recent years, data analysis has been driving a lot of organizations’ decision-making and has become the favorable approach to the majority of CIOs.
Someone recently asked me, “What about gut instinct and emotion in decision-making? What about being visionary and seeing beyond what the data reveals? Are these unique traits of successful leaders and other individuals going to become redundant, replaced by cold, heartless, data crunching statisticians? Could companies like Eccella be contributing to the elimination of would-be great gut decision-makers such as Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and others that built products and businesses on vision and instinct?”
In short – no. One of the key benefits of making data-driven decisions is the removal of guesswork from the decision-making process. Guessing is not intuition, it’s a way to choose without gathering evidence. Guessing is high risk decision-making – it’s risking a higher probability of choosing incorrectly.
So, should you replace guessing with more evidence-based decision-making? Absolutely yes. Most decision makers are not Steve Jobs. Making purely instinct-based decisions screams too much risk. Decision makers these days have a luxury many others in the past might not have had – to operate on instinct AND validate their plan with data.
At what point do you choose to augment your gut instinct with an investment in data-driven mechanisms? The more important and more frequent decisions you need to make, the more critical it is to rely on data. When you need to frequently evaluate in areas such as recruitment, marketing, or consumer behavior, rely on data. When you need to make a significant, big impact decision on a new product investment, going into a new market, or opening a new store, listen to your gut and your data. This will not only validate your gut instinct but also enable high quality measurements of your execution and results as you progress, helping ensure you find and stay on the right path.
For effective, impactful data-driven gut decisions, companies must look beyond the initial cost and resource investment and realize the immense value in using data to improve decision-making. From small organizations to large enterprises, transform the process and watch low risk, high reward data-driven decision-making become part of your DNA.
Start making data-driven decisions!
Meitav Harpaz, CEO of Eccella Corporation