Will Data Science Make Your Business Instincts Irrelevant?

or now anyway, intuition is alive and well in the era of data analytics. Only about a third of executives in a 2014 PwC survey reported relying first and foremost on the data for their last big business decision. For the rest, the advice of their colleagues and good, old-fashioned gut instinct both played major roles. It’s no wonder, is it? Leaders tend to get where they are at least partly on the basis of their good judgment, which has guided them to success time and again. These days, with a deluge of new data insights closer to hand than ever before, wading through them all can seem overwhelming or even distracting. We’re still in the early days of big data—and of data science in business writ large—so it’s probably not a surprise that subjective measures still play a predominant role. That doesn’t need to be a bad thing, but sometimes it is. Here’s what you need to know in order to keep your gut instinct and the cold, hard numbers in good balance.