Recipe for Success: Facts Vs. Gut Instinct

Let us ask you something quickly – if you knew that your decision would have led to a 20% annual revenue growth, would you have said “No” to it? Or, if you knew that your decision would have led to half of your staff losing their jobs would you have said “Yes” to it?  

While the answers seem pretty obvious, making the right choice is not as straightforward in practice. 

It is estimated that an average adult makes more than 35,000 decisions every day. Some decisions may carry more weight than others, but surely enough, every decision impacts the eventual outcome. Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? 

When making these choices, multiple factors influence our decisions, such as experience, age, commitment, and cognitive bias, to name a few. In a business environment, add on deadlines, stress, opinions, distractions, and the meer volume of decisions that we must make daily. Conclusion? Well, it’s pretty damn easy to make the wrong choice. 

In our previous article, we established the WHY behind our work, and now it’s time to dive a little deeper into our HOW. 

While writing this article, I was sitting next to a friend who owns a business in the hospitality sector. For the last two years, despite the excellent quality of their products, they have been struggling to make ends meet. Over the months, I have observed that their customer demographic was changing, COVID and related restrictions affected them, and their marketing efforts ceased to exist. The operational conditions have drastically changed while they haven’t. 

So I asked him some questions – “Have you spoken to your customers lately? Did you look at why your competitors outperform you under the same conditions? Did you try to optimize your costs by looking through your sales data? Finally, I asked, how do you make your business decisions today without relying on all this data?”

His answer was concise and to the point – “No, and I don’t need this information to make my decisions, I have it all in my head, and I know my business.”

So, what are your thoughts on this example? To us, this feels like they are basing their business decisions solely on their gut instinct, and clearly, it’s not working.

“One decision-making tool — human intuition — seems to offer a reliable alternative to painstaking fact gathering and analysis.” and “45% of corporate executives now rely more on instinct than on facts and figures in running their businesses. While some have argued that intuition becomes more valuable in highly complex and changeable environments, the opposite is actually true. The more options you have to evaluate, the more data you have to weigh, and the more unprecedented the challenges you face, the less you should rely on instinct and the more on reason and analysis.” – read full article 

As Brandble, we firmly believe that no matter how painstaking fact gathering and analysis can be, it is one of the most crucial tools to validate your decisions and avoid failure. Failure is a lot more painful than the effort required to pre-validate your ideas.

All you need is to take a small step back, be more curious, and think objectively rather than intuitively and you will stand a chance of significantly reducing the risk of failure.

For this very reason, research and discovery are at the core of our work. As Brandble, we understand that you, as a decision-maker, have a lot on your plate, and this is why we are here to help you validate your ideas together and before you implement them. After all, these decisions come with great responsibility.

Our research process focuses on three pillar points: client, competitors, and audience discovery. Each of these steps happens in sequence, allowing us to capture your commercial idea accurately, define the external threats or opportunities and validate it using the real opinions of your existing or potential customers. As a result, we offer you unbiased facts and analysis to substantiate your next steps.