In Part 1 of “The Relationship Problem That Business Leaders Need To Address”, we took a high level look at the relationship between intuition and analysis within businesses.

In this article, we will give greater context to this relationship by observing a conversation between a fictional married couple…Ingrid (representing intuition) and Alan (representing analysis).

Specifically, we will look at Alan’s hardcore, myopic analytical approach.

Alan (analysis): I’ve noticed that you place your fork on the northeast corner of your plate in the middle of our meals.

 

Ingrid (intuition): So what?

 

Alan (analysis): Just trying to be helpful.

 

Ingrid (intuition): Helpful for what exactly?

 

Alan (analysis): Oh, just generally helpful. That’s all.

In this interaction, we see that Alan’s analysis serves no point. It may be completely factual and proven, yet it is completely and utterly disconnected from making a difference about anything meaningful.

The business parallel is this….just because certain data exists and can be displayed in an eye-appealing manner through visualizations, that doesn’t mean it is helpful. In fact, it can serve as a distraction to what really matters and be genuinely annoying.

Without a deep understanding of the underlying business essentials (strategies, challenges, opportunities, etc.) that respective business leaders are facing, any reports, visualizations, and dashboards produced will be as helpful as Alan was to Ingrid in that conversation.

This is illustrative of one of Part 1’s points:

Analysis without intuition is likely to be highly sterile. And wrong.

Our Live BI engagements are designed to enhance (and repair, if necessary) the relationship between intuition and analysis in your business resulting in insights for impact like never before.