Some random thoughts of intuitive decision-making

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For some 10 years thousands of companies have been using Process Mining to aid their process improvement initiatives. Without going too much into detail what the benefits of such analytical tools could be (see https://www.voglio.no/partners/celonis), we simply conclude here that Process Mining provides leaders better visibility of actual business processes to support their decision-making when fixing various process related issues. That's the theory at least, but what about in reality? One favorite theme for business school studies has been the role of gut feeling in decisions even when hard-backed evidence, such as reports, could be made available.

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I'm writing this blog while being on a road cycling training camp on Mallorca. Similarly to people in business, we in endurance sports are also drowned with massive amounts of data gathered by our expensive gadgets. After a week of trashing ourselves with long days on our bikes it's interesting to take a closer look at training data. If one wouldn't know the context of the on-going training camp, by just staring at numbers it would seem like our fitness is degrading instead of getting better. Power output and heart rates are going down, which is supported by heavy legs and occasionally low levels of motivation. My roommate, developer for a famous company producing smart rings for fitness, told me he started to receive reports telling him that he's experiencing high stress and is likely to get ill. Only after the first day of training another app prescribed us three recovery days. This is of course nonsense and makes me question the usefulness of such tools in the first place. Business studies confirm the obvious that it's good to rely on data and analysis when it's available and applicable, but feel free to also trust your instincts and experience (https://hbr.org/2019/10/when-its-ok-to-trust-your-gut-on-a-big-decision).

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Having worked with Business Intelligence for a long while, it seems like analytics can often raise questions more than they can answer them. Performance reporting is happily squeezed in to single metrics or KPIs, which underestimates the complexity of the world around us, and frankly underestimates our years long experience as professionals. When our reality can't be compressed to satisfactory answers using these reports, we have a tendency of either falling back to intuitive decision-making using our gut feeling, or we roll a dice and ask ChatGPT what they mean, or why should we even care.

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Process Mining, the technology we at Voglio offer together with Celonis (https://www.celonis.com/), can bridge this gap and give leaders better means of discover something truly new information of their business without feeling like being spoon-fed children. But with great innovations there's always a catch: as Process Mining reveals full end-to-end pictures of working processes, it also doesn't hide anything behind simple aggregated metrics. Hence interpreting what is seen in dashboards and concluding best corrective actions requires deep business understanding (knowing the context) and leadership skills to drive the needed change.

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In sports as well as in business some of the most capable people are absolutely obsessed with hoarding data. There's nothing wrong with that. But I do also remember times when we could watch Contador on Eurosport racing to mountaintops without constantly looking at his computers and attacking the field by feel. That was cool too. As a conclusion it makes sense to constantly seek and be open for alternative sources to validate intuitive decisions, but when needed, also trust yourself.

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- Erno