“Decisions over Decimals: How to Find Balance Between Intuition and Information” [Podcast notes]

Book recommended in this episode: “Decisions Over Decimals” by Christopher Frank, Paul Magnone, and Oded Netzer

My key takeaways from this episode:

What should listeners know about understanding data

• Today data accessibility is more available, the tooling to analyse data is cheaper, and it’s expected of leaders that they make data-informed decisions.
• Yet, although most things are measured, many things are not improved. The challenge is not the data, it’s the decision-making.
• You can torture data enough to get them to admit to anything. The question is how to interpret data correctly and how to factor in human interpretation.

Where to start?

1) Ask powerful questions

• Ask the right questions of the data and of yourself.
• Spend enough time understanding the problem before you jump into solutions. With the amount of data available, it’s easy to jump into solutioning to have the improssion of “doing” something. Thinking about the problem is also “doing”, and it’s arguably the most important “doing” we can do.

2) Don’t try to find the perfect decision

• It’s a fallacy that the more data you have, the more able you are to find the right decision.
• Certainty is a myth regardless of how much data you have.
• Good decision making is about making the best decision you can with the info you have at the moment, then having the conviction and courage to change it once you have new information.

3) Invest time in framing the problem

• IWIK (“I wish I knew”) is the question to ask to internal stakeholder or external customer: What questions do you need me to answer in order for you to make a comfortable decision?

What processes are good enough to help teams make decisions?

• Synthesize — Good decisions are about navigating ambiguity and zooming in and out and using the organisational brain to synthesise all of that together. Most organisations are not synthesising well. Good product teams do it well. Marketing organisations need to do this well to launch coherent campaigns.
• Triangulate — Context is king and data without context is dangerous. Context is how you triangulate data points (triangulate = you look at them in absolute, over time, and relatively to a benchmark).
• Agree on a confidence level — What “confidence level” is good enough? It depends. For a Space Shuttle, 95% confidence is really bad. For recommending a Nextflix movie to a friend, 95% is awesome.
• Rely on qualitative intuition — People tend to think about information and intuition as an oxymorons. At a leadership level, you need to strike the right balance between information and intuition.

• Most people are uncomfortable with change. When they’re uncomfortable, they will retreat to what is familiar to them. They may avoid making decisions and asking for more data (we call this persona “Robert Seemore”) or just rely on what is familiar to them (e.g. gut feeling).
• The balance between strategic and operational is hard to strike.
• Strong leaders balance risk, time, and trust. VC investors invest in people, not in tech or tools. They want to have a sense that people will work through problems and have a feel for the business, balancing an analytical and intuitive view.
• Different teams will look at the same data and draw different conclusions.

About this episode

Podcast episode: “Decisions over Decimals: How to Find Balance Between Intuition and Information” from the Strategy & Leadership Podcast (Ep.205)
Host: Anthony Taylor
Guests: Paul Magnone, Christopher Frank & Oded Netzer
Date: December 2, 2022

Paul Magnone, Christopher Frank & Oded Netzer join us for this episode to discuss how their new book (Decisions Over Decimals) came about, making data driven decisions as a leader, the different ways data can by manipulated, why the perfect decision doesn’t exist, and much more.

Paul, Christopher and Oded are the authors of Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance Between Intuition & Information. Paul is Head of Global Strategic Alliances at Google, Christopher is a VP at American Express, and Oded is a Professor of Business at Columbia Business School.