What’s the Magic Formula to Make the Right Decision?

The decision intelligence is putting together facts - own experience, other's experience, and analysis. 

Having all the facts to make the best decision is a utopia we would all like. But as the saying goes, if you don't move swiftly someone may eat your lunch. Technically, how shall you weigh in the data and gut feeling to make the effective decision at the right time?

Advanced Analytics (predictive and prescriptive analytics) plays a more critical role in decision making. Delivery of information is constantly speeding up, but sometimes it's not 100% what the decision maker desires and their gut-check (experience) must be leveraged. When analytics can really deliver actionable recommendations from the plethora of data, business leaders can begin trusting the analysis more and allow their gut to recommend lunch.

Gut feelings can override logical analysis quite rightly sometimes. An informed gut feeling is more likely to be working with more information and possibly even relevant and accurate information, and could, therefore, at least, eliminate some poor choices. It is still quite possible for gut feelings to override logical analysis, and sometimes quite rightly. As there are always some assumptions made in data selection and analysis, it is likely to be some time before totally rational decisions can be universal. Better keep an informed gut around for a while.

Intelligence is INTELLIGENCE whatever is the form. This comes from data (experience is after the event). All intelligence is putting together facts - own experience, other's experience, and analysis. BI no doubt adds to confidence when you take a decision. Ultimately you succeed from art out of science (data and reason). Sometimes the data reveals unexpected results and decisions are made on reactions. So visualization may help to explain the information to reduce that gut decision.

Making decisions is both an art and science. Operative clause in BI is that it supports the decision-making process, it's not supposed to substitute it. It's crucial to get reliable information out to the businesses that support them in their decision making. Your gut feeling is not always accurate. It is fed by sometimes conflicting feelings. The facts are the facts and that can help keep you on track. Also, the facts can be faster than a gut feeling to show when things start to go wrong, or just a different direction than projected or desired result. And it will give you a good insight to what you're saying no to when you choose to do something against the numbers. However what the business often forgets is that it also needs to be able to understand what that information means and what it may, or may not as the case may imply to their business.

There is no magic decision making formula on how much percentage of information plus how much percentage of gut feeling you shall weigh in making effective decision, Test golden ratio (80% of information + 20% of gut feel) for practicing and improvement, in today’s complex business environment, more often, strategic decisions have to be made via information-based insight and foresight, and operational decisions are also based on data analytics to predict what will happen and how to response to it. But in either case, the right dose of intuition is still critical in decision right by the right persons at the right timing.

Posted in: Big Data,Decision Making