How to Improve Your ‘Gut Instinct’ Using Data

Everybody has a gut feeling that they go by from time to time. They can either live by it or swear that they were thinking about it a moment ago. A gut feeling is that fleeting moment between insight and action. You have an insight in your mind and you want to take some type of action towards it. But you felt like you’re held back and you’re in two minds about what to do.

The Problem of ‘Gut Instinct’ and Uncertainty

This is the problem of ‘uncertainty’, and it’s a very common one that plagues entrepreneurs throughout countries and industries. What to do when you don’t know what to do?

Do you take action or wait and see? Or do you try to gather more data and more insight from the matter at hand? This is the very conundrum that inspires gut feeling to emerge in the first place. When people don’t want to take action, they blame their gut feeling for putting them in the wrong place. When they take action and fail, they blame their luck, or the timing wasn’t right. In fact, a lot of the times it’s just a game of chance.

E.g. if you’re going to invest in a new business, or acquire a competitor’s technology offering, then you’re left either trusting the numbers or your gut feeling that something isn’t right. You can Churchill your way into war or figure out another approach based on your insight and judgement on the matter.

Being Too Reliant on Your Gut

You can also prepare various solutions to the problems that you approach and create a sense of decision matrix. You can develop a sense of pride in your solution and take action depending on the feedback that you get. All of this and much more, go into the idea of gut feeling. But how is that we can shape it better?

We can do that with the help of more information, insight and development. We can also do so with the help of more adequate information that relies well on AI instructed machines and systems. E.g. we can either rely on market data or create new experiments in-house to be able to determine the value of the data that we are seeing.

Otherwise we create a sense of emptiness in our gut, and our gut-feeling could be nothing more than a mere echo-chamber of our thoughts and emotions. Sometimes, we fear the things that we want the most and that leads our gut feeling astray. In other words, may want to succeed in business, but we may have certain biases that prevent us from doing so.

Leveraging Data to Enhance Your Instincts

When it comes to high-tech solutions, we can have various solutions that we leverage. We can go ahead with an approach that demands more data and more insights, or we can do the more segmentation route. Both approaches are valid in their own way and create new information where there wasn’t any previously.

They also dictate that there may be many ways to approach a problem, and if you are feeling stuck within your gut feeling, then looking at data may be a better idea. Data is the final equalizer, in that it provides the truth behind certain matters. But data, is also flawed, in that it can be edited, manipulated and retained for different uses. E.g. the same data set can be interpreted to mean two different things if read by two different people.

When you are approaching the problem at hand through data and gut-feeling together – that’s a unique combination that can be leveraged at-scale. This is why C-suite executives read research reports on a daily basis. They want more insights and more information. They don’t want to get left out on anything and want the latest information on what’s happening.

Being Updated on the Right Data Sets

Whether that’s a new store launched in Nigeria, or a new car being designed by Tesla – reading up on what’s happening from a data perspective is critical. If you’re not taking gut-feeling decisions after carefully considering the various ‘truths’ out there, then you aren’t taking your own personal truth into the picture.

You’ve come a long way to where you are, and you’ve gotten here through careful analysis of ‘doubt’. Your gut feeling changes, but typically when you look at more information and data, the answer is clear. You can get the things you want but you have to obtain more information.

E.g. if you are approaching a new client and you don’t know what to lead with, you can use data to ensure that you’re doing the right thing and saying the right words to them. You can access their social medias, their blogs and their websites to get a better understanding of who you’re talking to. After this level of analysis your gut-feeling is fired up and you can make better decisions.

Research is Key When it Comes to Instinct

If you had entered cold and didn’t know the person, you have to spend hours trying to establish context and a real connection with them to begin with. This would take more time and effort if everyone in the organization did that.

That’s why it’s important to take data into account anytime you’re making a decision. Over time, the gut feeling gets enhanced and you start to see that all the data-points start to coalesce into one big picture. That big picture could be anything from a new acquisition proposal to an up-sell in quantity or range.

This could also help you lead into more insights that impact your business in general. A great leader is one step ahead of the industry and understands where the industry is going at certain times. They also know the value of staying grounded, and therefore need data to prove or disprove their theories.

When they leverage data in this way, they have a better shot at providing insights that open their own eyes to what decisions they should take. Whether that’s effective marketing or offering a more competitive tech advantage – they know what they already know. All they need to do is to take action through data.

Conclusion

When facing a long-standing problem, you should consult your gut-feeling but also use data to support your assumptions. Take action now, but be aware of the risks of following your instincts.