14 years ago we started a business that was so fast paced that our ideas, insights and decisions were made on the basis of wafer thin slices of evidence and data. Yet we were surprisingly accurate in our assumptions and recommendations.
Today, we’re in the process of developing one of the most sophisticated marketing platforms in Canada, where data capture, modeling and analysis will be at the core of our operation.
We’ve had the debate concerning the effects this will have on the instinctual decision making that’s served us so well in the past, the ethereal magic of gut knowledge.
As Levitt and Dubner outline in Freakonomics, their brilliant study of the ‘hidden side of everything’, things are rarely as they appear. The shocking answer to ‘what’s more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?’ is both entertaining and sobering. They demonstrate that hard facts bring truth to our world, peeling back opaque layers of human misinterpretation.
Will info ever trump instinct, will the indisputable algorithmic evidence replace the art and science of intuition? Data is our strategic compass, giving us the confidence and foundation to make smart decisions, offering well grounded, logical direction through an increasingly challenging business landscape.
43% of CEOs still see good intuition as a key to success, subscribing to Carl Jung’s belief that “It is fashionably stupid to regard everything one cannot explain as a fraud.” Jungian CEOs still believe that some things just can’t be found in the data.
So, although a pig headed passion for intuition has served us well, a grain-of-salt approach to data analysis will always result in tastier ideas and solutions.