The psychological habit most people lack and why you can’t hope to use data to guide your actions effectively without it

Businesses are hiring data scientists in droves to make rigorous, scientific, unbiased, data-driven decisions.

And now, the bad news: those decisions usually aren’t.

For a decision to be data-driven, it has to be the data — as opposed to something else entirely — that drive it. Seems so straightforward, and yet it’s so rare in practice because decision-makers lack a key psychological habit.

Data-drivenness destroyed

Imagine that you are considering buying something online instead of making a pilgrimage to the other side of town to fetch it. You’ve boiled your decision down to whether or not you trust the online seller. A quick search yields some relevant data: you see that the seller has an average rating of 4.2 out of 5.

Without decision-making fundamentals, your decision will be at best inspired by data, but not driven by it.

Now you can’t use that 4.2 to drive your decision. Game over! Once we’ve seen the answer, we’re free to pick the most convenient question. If the first thing we do is poke around in our data, our decision will be, at best, something I like to call data-inspired.

#data science #data scientists #data-driven decisions #unbiased