Here’s the million-dollar question: Should you make decisions based on data or desire?
Let me give you my perspective…
There is a fine line between getting the data and being data trapped. Sometimes the data doesn’t always give us the full picture. We have to understand there are always two sides to a decision; the data and the desire. Sometimes we make decisions purely based on the data without any desire of what we intuitively want. Other times we make decisions based on our desire of what we want regardless of what the data says. Understand that in and of themselves you should never make a decision with just one factor when it’s in your control. Decisions work best when the two are balanced. But if one is going to outweigh the other, you need to lean towards desire.
Before the data people freak out…let me unpack this a bit.
Allow me to further define a healthy description of desire. Desire works best when it’s tempered with discipline. Just because you desire a shiny object doesn’t mean you just get it, you have to challenge yourself to filter your desire through discipline. Disciplined desire forces you to strain out reckless impulse and extract methodical determination. Remember, when Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Basically, he was saying the data would have driven to breed a better horse, but he had a desire to change the world through something that became known as the automobile. Who knew that is what the people wanted? A survey wouldn’t have worked. A study on transportation wouldn’t have worked. And a team of only data-driven advisors wouldn’t have worked, for they would have just agreed with faster horses. It took a desire that was disciplined with vision and innovation. That is why Ford became a highly successful company that changed the world.
Sometimes you have to drive through the data to breakthrough.
There is an X factor to effective decision making. The X factor is the gut feeling that highly successful people live by. This is where highly calculative people push back on. Please understand I am not knocking data, I just find through immense study and real life experience that disciplined desire has lead to all great breakthroughs above data-driven calculations. Success is more of an art than it is a science. Albert Einstein is attributed to have said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
We have to be very careful not to be confined to the data dungeon where we become imprisoned by the paralysis of analysis. Always seek data, get the data, and analyze the data, but not at the expense of delaying an intuitive decision based on experience and vision. Remember, all great advancements require a step into the unknown. In fact, playing it safe is actually the riskiest place to be. Balance the data and the desire, but trust your leadership intuition that at times doesn’t always align with the data.
