The February 2015 PwC booklet called Gut & gigabytes: The art and science of
big decisions observes that: “Right now, intuition still prevails, with
the majority of corporate decision-makers finding that listening to their gut
is preferable to “paralysis by analysis.” More and more, however, executives
will be pressed to defend their choices against contrary outcomes that were
plainly visible in the data tea leaves. The key isn’t to favor one approach
over the other — art versus science — but rather to cultivate and hone the role
that instinct plays in our increasingly data-driven world (or, conversely, hone
the role that data plays in our intuition-prone decision-making).
The booklet is supported by the 40-page report called Gut & gigabytes: Capitalising on the art
& science in decision making. That report was prepared by the Economist
Intelligence Unit, sponsored by PwC. It is intended to explore the agenda for big
decisions and the process that business leaders will go through in making these
decisions.
Big decisions are
the most significant decisions about the strategic direction of the business
(i.e., not concerned with day-to-day operations). Big data are the recent wave of electronic information produced in
greater volume by a growing number of sources (i.e., not just data collected by
a particular organisation in the course of normal business). Data analysis is
the use of analytical techniques to generate new insights from data.
Executives know the right questions to ask. Now they need to
know how to get the right answers from the data (and have the desire to do so).
Those who do not should consider learning how. Those who resist doing so will
gradually be replaced, as the next generation of data-savvy executives and
future senior managers come through. By the time this happens, most executives
should be using big data to make strategic decisions – rather than the other
way around.
