Question: Could data-driven decisions be hurting your organization’s competitiveness and creativity?

This is a bit of a contrarian thought experiment. I'm not suggesting everyone stop using data or that data-driven decisions are bad. Hear me out.

(caveat, my arguments likely applies more to larger companies in established industries serving mass market products and services)

Over the past decade, big data, analytics, and data science have exploded. Conducting large-scale consumer insights research has become easier and faster. Your company probably invested heavily in people, tools, and infrastructure to manage and analyze an ever-growing mountain of data.

So did your competitors.

With that in mind, consider the following:

• Your competitors have access to the same or very similar data – leading them to make similar decisions.
• No one gets fired for making a big decision based on data.
• We are using data from the past to predict or inform decisions about the future (obvious, I know, but sometimes it's easy to forget).
• With today's flood of data, analyses are often ambiguous, and even when we see non-causal results and correlations, we want to craft a narrative that fits our perceptions.
• Garbage in, garbage out. Data hygiene issues, asking the wrong questions, or not fully understanding data sources leads to flawed conclusions.
• Ongoing asks for more data or a new, different analysis can be "weaponized" by executives who aren't on board with an idea but for political reasons don't want to say so directly. This ultimately delays, slows down, waters down, or simply kills an idea.
• Ongoing asks for more data or a new, different analysis can be "weaponized" by executives who aren't on board with an idea but for political reasons don't want to say so directly. This ultimately delays, slows down, waters down, or simply kills an idea.

So, has the pendulum swung too far? Is it time to re-balance?

• Is an over-reliance on data overshadowing the value of creativity and intuition?
• Are organizations overemphasizing the role of data in making strategy and product decisions?
• Are teams spending too much time on reports, dashboards, and analyses that add limited value versus building great products and experiences that delight our customers?
• Are executives making too many “safe” decisions due to an over-reliance on data vs. bolder, riskier bets?