A Dash of Data, a Spoonful of Intuition

As a leader, it's important to make informed decisions that will have a positive impact on your organization.

But how do you know when to rely on data and when to use intuition?

The truth is, both data and intuition are valuable tools that can help you make better decisions. Data can provide valuable insights into your business operations, customer behavior, and market trends. Intuition can help you make decisions based on your experience and expertise.

Here are a few tips:

1. Use data to inform your decisions when you have access to it. Look for trends, patterns, and insights that can help you make better decisions. Research by Laura Huang, Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, shows that gut feeling can be useful, in highly uncertain circumstances. Rely on intuition when you're facing a complex problem with no clear solution, for which further data won’t necessarily impact the decision one way or another.

   
   

   Use your experience and expertise to guide your decision-making process. As prof. Huang notes in a Harvard Business Review article:

“The role of gut feel is often to inspire a leader to make a call, particularly when the decision is risky… Trusting your gut allows leaders the freedom to move forward.”

2. Use a combination of data and intuition when you're making strategic decisions that will have a long-term impact on your organization. This will help you make well-informed decisions that align with your organization's goals. Keep track of what you know (i.e. data) vs. what you assume (i.e. gut) so you can revise or adjust your decisions when new data points become available. De-risk your decisions by breaking them down into smaller bets that leave your options open but still allow you to validate the direction.

   
   

3. Leverage intuition to brainstorm and generate a lot of different ideas for different solutions to a challenge. Once you identify the most relevant alternatives, data can help you test and compare multiple solutions and identify the best one.

   
   

To make the best decisions, it's essential to strike a balance between data and intuition. A dash of data can provide you with valuable insights, while a spoonful of intuition can help you make decisions that align with your organization's values and culture, as well as rely on your experience and expertise.

Also published here.