Smart Decisions are Data Driven Decisions

How do you know you are making the right decisions? If you were to ask me this question a number of years back, I would have told you proudly that I "trust my gut." At the time, I was enamored with the idea that my intuition had never steered me wrong, and I had a strong sense of its ability. In fact, if you were to look into my Meyers - Briggs personality assessment, this would be a heavy influencer on the behavioral composition of my personality. However, I learned early on in my career that you simply can't base your decisions on some gut feeling or intuition.

In my first management role, I was excited to make changes, to solve problems. This was the first time I was in a position that enabled me to make incredible improvements to my department and impact the organization positively. I was elated to finally be in the role and start making modifications and changes that I thought would better suit the business.

The Issue

The first proposal I took to my boss was carefully articulated, with a strong argument for why my proposal would help the organization, but was shot down immediately. Then the second. I simply didn't understand. These solutions were logical, and made perfect sense. They were inline with my intuition which I had learned to trust instinctively. Why in the world did my boss not see the light? He couldn't be this misguided could he be?

I finally decided to ask him - "What was it that caused you to turn down my proposals?" He mentioned that there wasn't a shred of data to back up my "gut instincts" and that without the data, no decisions to make changes would ever happen. OK. Easy enough. I went back to the computer, completed a couple of reports full of data analytics, pulled out some numbers - and what did you know - the data backed up both of my proposals!

I felt triumphant, even more validated than in the beginning, that my intuition would never steer me wrong. But I did learn that I always needed to have data to back up my decisions - that this was how my boss operated - and I would need to follow the process in order to get anything accomplished.

Lesson Learned

The lesson here was not that I was right, and that data in the case of my decisions was unimportant. Quite the contrary, actually. It wasn't soon after this experience that I went to the data to prove yet another proposal. I was simply stunned. The solution was logical, it made perfect sense. But the data didn't agree - in fact, I was way off. The data told me a different story, one that I hadn't fully considered, and because of it, I made some changes to my proposal that actually ended up making a difference.

Lesson learned. There is no harm, only benefit, to having data back up and drive your decision making. My decision making habits have changed, thanks to my boss, and now I always look to the data to determine if I'm on the right path or not. I also understand that the data will not always be there, or be conclusive enough to aid in making informed decisions - but these situations will be few and far between the many opportunities to have facts drive your decisions.

Final Thoughts

Consider this: Making decisions without data is simply gambling. Do you want to gamble in your organization? Do you want to make costly decisions at the expense of your customers, your employees, etc? I've seen it many times in my career where decisions were made without data, or in complete disregard of the data, all which ended up costing the organization lost productivity, lost profits, failed strategy, and more. Don't make the same mistake. Make decisions only after consulting the data to see what's really going on.