You’re running all out but failing to reach a goal. Your team is grinding through tasks and decisions. If companies want to grow, compete, and win they need to accelerate decisions. It is estimated the average American makes 70 decisions per day, according to Professor Sheena S. Iyengar, at Columbia Business School. Given the frequency, the real need is for a practical approach to lead in a data-driven world.
Our research with 2,100 professionals concluded that data in high doses is harmful. It doesn’t speed decision-making, improve logic, or enable the best decision. In fact, while data is black and white, the truth is clearly gray. The gray comes from intangibles such as bias, risk appetite, history, stakeholders’ conflicting priorities, problem definition, and expectations: things we can’t know through numbers, but only through experience and intuition.
To make effective decisions across teams of different sizes, experiences, locations, and with varying amounts of data, we developed seven lessons to better faster decisions.