A new kind of a team

Decision making in businesses have traditionally (there are exceptions) been over-reliant on the few expert judgments to vector them. This has offered a tactical advantage, albeit not guaranteed success.

A huge opportunity exists in applying evidence-based decision making to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

We need to revisit our idea of designing and building teams. While it needs to cater to the short term demands of the business, it needs to consider the long term too.

Teams should necessarily refrain from using the words data and analytics as the scope would extend far beyond these two disciplines — behavioral economists, psychologists, engineers and change management work hand-in-hand with data scientists, mathematicians and statisticians.

This multidisciplinary approach is essential to go beyond merely generating new insights from data but also to systematically enhance individual human judgment in real business contexts.

A major part of the team should be from beyond the industry to enable it to challenge the status quo approach to decision-making. The purpose of the team is to not only prepare data and build models, but also emphasizes the identification of business opportunities and education, change management and implementation — the complete value chain from framing questions through to changing behaviors.