“Beware of the HiPPO in the room” — The risks and dangers of top-down, intuition-based decision making are well known in the business world. Experimentation and data-based decision making become widely acknowledged as the right way to steer a business.

For a good reason: Leading experimenters such as Netflix, Google and Booking show that making decisions based on facts and evidence rather than intuition can lead to exceptional business success.

But** what if in the course of this development the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) is not the one to be afraid of anymore?** What if the person that should help to fight top-down decision making took his place?

What if the analyst is the new biasing factor in decision making?

Let me be clear. Having personal opinions about new ideas, suggestions and approaches couldn’t be more natural. **We all have our cognitive biases. **But we can not ignore this fact just because of the allegedly safe framework of evidence-based decision making.

Source: Unsplash

Biasing Analytics Results

The analyst’s responsibility is to paint a clear picture of the business’ situation and inform decision-making. And there are plenty of ways how an analyst can, willingly or entirely unaware, bias the final decision that is made. I like to split those into conscious and unconscious biases.

#decision-making #data #data-science #bias #analytics