Haste makes waste; look before you leap…we’ve heard these ever popular phrases before. They’ve been drummed into our subconscious mind to warn us against taking hurried steps. Careful, cold-hard thinking is what has always been encouraged. Gathering as much information as possible and deliberation on hard facts are emphasized. And yet, whenever we are pressed for time or are under pressure to deliver fast... gut feeling rules and snap judgments follow. Intuition or gut feelings naturally come across as a concept that we use to largely describe thoughts and impressions that don’t seem entirely rational. In several organizations, decision makers at all levels rely on their finely honed intuitive abilities and most of such decisions have met with controlled success.

However, while not undermining the importance and allure of intuition, it is necessary to understand that making marketing decisions based on just plain intuition or obsolete knowledge or past experiences has an inherent risk of missing the finer vital details or widely misjudging. And while successful business decisions driven by hunches are lauded, big and expensive bad decisions based on gut feeling are either swept under the rug or conveniently forgotten. At this rate, companies working solely on intuitive-decision making will forever be working at suboptimal levels.

On the other hand, those companies which have migrated from intuition-driven decision making to data and knowledge-driven decision making have shown rapid growth, the most dramatic results occurring where the culture has shifted from solely intuitive to one that combines intuition and insight from knowledge. For example, a leading global financial services firm that was once an offshoot of a relatively small division of US-based bank is now counted among the Fortune 200 and rivals the largest global credit card companies-- by competing with knowledge. Some of the present-day giants among retailers and pharma majors have propelled themselves to the top of their game by becoming knowledge competitors.

Knowledge-driven processes rely on logic, quantitative analysis, and — although not a critical success-determining factor — tons of data. Companies are waking up to the fact that better knowledge leads to informed decisions, which leads to superior business outcomes — a much better alternative to blind decision making, wherein the impacts of facts and traps remain obscured from view. However, as we herald the arrival of knowledge-centric organizations, we should remember that knowledge-based decision making is not a perfect science, as yet. It is a matter of making consistently good decisions based on solid data that is rigorously analyzed over time.

By Brian Welsh