From scattered data to a decision

This is what I say whenever someone tells me proudly that "our company collects a great deal of data".

What decision intelligence is

Picture a room stacked with excellent ingredients that nobody has cooked. Plenty of ingredients do not make a meal on their own. Data is the same: scattered and sitting still, it says nothing yet. Decision intelligence is the discipline of connecting data to a specific decision that has to be made, turning numbers into action.

In 2018 Google created a new role, Chief Decision Scientist, and the first person to hold it, Cassie Kozyrkov, went on to train around 20,000 Google employees in making decisions from data. The core of the discipline is to begin from the decision that needs making, and only then ask backwards what data is needed, rather than gathering data first and casting about for what it says.

How this applies to running a business

I see many businesses fall into the trap of a beautiful dashboard that produces no decisions. The screen is full of charts, and after the weekly meeting everything continues exactly as before. The problem is not a shortage of data, it is that the data has not been connected to a clear decision.

Reversing it is very practical: before building a report, ask "what decision am I trying to make, and which number would make me decide differently". One measure that changes what you do is worth more than ten charts to look at.

Which decision does the report you read most often actually lead to, or is it only there to know?