Data, AI & Intuition

In an age where data is prominent and all-encompassing, we have no excuse not to use data to decide smarter and faster.

Organizations keep collecting more data and generating multiple reports, dashboards, and drill-down reports. However, most organizations fail to act on data. Recipients of the reports fail to read, reflect, and act on them.

This is partly due to the old mindset, not appreciating the value of constant measurement and optimization, and partly because of purposeless data analytics. The result is a major gap between the collection and reporting of data and the actions that follow.

Acting daily on data indicates that companies live in the new digital world.

Of course, data should be accurate, fresh, relevant, and digestible so that we easily get valuable insights that help us to act.

Sometimes it’s easy to understand the problem and what to do next.

Thankfully, AI and ML keep giving us better tools to automate decision-making and action. Anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and action-driven analytics can boost organizations’ performance. Everything that can be automated should, because it helps to increase our performance and decrease operational costs.

The new mindset for business leaders is to think of our persistent challenges as ML solutions. Everything depends on people, the data scientists, who write or calibrate the algorithms, if they have a holistic understanding of the Cosmos, they will create valuable algorithms. Most of the time, this is not yet the case, and we see AI or ML that are too naïve and simplistic and can hardly get applied and deployed to more than 20% of the scope they are supposed to cover. Thankfully, this is improving fast. Generative AI certainly promises a better future for faster “simple transactional” decisions as far as we learn how to use it and continuously calibrate it (ML) to our needs.

Of course, many times, it’s not easy to understand the problem or opportunity and what to do next. Usually, data gives us hints that we may interpret well or not. We need to take time to reflect or dig further to understand the causes and what we should do.

Although we have more data than ever before to help us decide and act, it becomes increasingly difficult to make good decisions and execute them on the fly. We are drowning in data, structured and unstructured. We are constantly distracted by digital noise. We have difficulty filtering what’s real, what’s fake, and what’s relevant to understand it and respond.

In an age where “data-driven decisions” become a fashion, we should acknowledge that most of the time, data are incomplete and do not give us a full picture or are misinterpreted. We often see the correlation, but we fail to understand the causation.

Asking provoking questions, reframing the problem, reflecting, contemplating, and elaborating on various alternatives are needed in our effort to understand what’s going on and connect the dots. This requires a holistic understanding of the environment and processes.

Data is often inaccurate or outdated or covers only a small part of the total picture. Smart leaders are not afraid to use their intuition, judgment, imagination, and assumptions to fill in the gaps to get the whole picture.

Planning and deciding based on assumptions, and the data available is better than not planning, not deciding, or deciding based on incomplete data only.

ISOROPIN data & intuition usually result in better decisions.