Intuition vs. data

I’ve noticed a pattern amongst authorities in the way that they use data.

They don’t use data.

Or more accurately, they’re selective about how they use it.

In the creative sense, for their thought leadership material, they’re wary of it, and I think you should be too.

Let's get clear though, in this context, what actually is data?

Invariably, it’s an attempt to measure success. How many likes, clicks, shares, or opens did this piece get?

The first problem with that is best articulated by Rory Sutherland:

“When you multiply bullshit with bullshit, you don’t get a bit more bullshit – you get bullshit squared.”

Those are nonsense metrics that tell you nothing of what you want to know.

Did the piece deeply resonate with the person you were trying to reach? Did it inspire action? Did it build trust? Did they share it for the reasons you’d want them to? Did it bring them one step closer to becoming a passionate advocate of your work?

There is no quantitative data that answers those questions.

And so a big problem of following data is that, as Rory might put it…

You base creative decisions on bullshit

You notice what got more clicks and opens and make more stuff like that without really knowing if that was the kind of material that would take you where you want to go.

You try to make logical decisions where logic doesn’t belong.

Here’s more from Rory:

“When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic–or even to experiment with it.” Rory Sutherland

The thought leadership you inspire to develop is indeed magic. When an authority notices an oddity that others had overseen, when they share that observation through a unique, interesting frame, that’s magic.

You might argue that inbound enquiries is a valid measure of success

A client of mine has built a 7-figure mastermind business in the commercial real estate space, all through inbound that he receives via his YouTube channel. He’s posted a video a week each week since 2020 and now has 90,000 subscribers. He typically signs up around 10 to 15 new clients per week at an annual recurring fee of $10,000.

We were trying to figure out which types of videos had the most impact on his business. Which videos were directly responsible for those 10 new clients?

We couldn’t.

The problem was, people binge content. They watch a bunch of videos, either through a sustained period of time or in a very concentrated period of time.

So, though an enquiry may have followed a particular email or video, It wasn’t one video that led to a sale, it was the accumulation.

We scrapped the idea of using data to inform creative because there was no data available that would measure the magic.

But there’s another problem at play here with a data-driven approach…

When we use quantitative data to make creative decisions, we confuse success with excellence

Ryan Hawk, bestselling author and host of The Learning Leader Show, said this:

“After years of interviewing some of the world’s most effective leaders for my podcast, The Learning Leader Show, and analyzing their habits and behaviors, one concept seems to stick out more than most. These high achievers focus on the daily action rather than the results. They commit to the process.” Ryan Hawk

Ryan later writes that, when asking his co-author, Brook Cupps, what the difference between success and excellence is, Brook replied, “Success is based on a comparison with others. Excellence is measured against your own potential.”

When you use quantitative data to make creative decisions, you’re making decisions on what you think will be successful rather than pursuing excellence.

Invisible experts become undisputed authorities because they pursue excellence rather than success.

With daily discipline, they obsess over figuring out the solution to a painful frustration as experienced by the group of people they solve.

They’re not driven by engagement metrics.

They’re driven by their own internal scoreboard, taste, and instinct of the problem and solution.

As Carl Richards, another Undisputed Authority, puts it:

“I just think of marketing as finding a problem I'm interested in solving. And by problem, I mean, it’s like a math problem that needs solving. It's not negative. Find a problem I'm interested in solving and then find a group of people who have that problem and then show up consistently over long periods of time with honest, clear ways of solving that problem.” Carl Richards

Thats your true north. Disciplined, pursuit of excellence in solving that problem and a desire to develop your craft in the way that you share your thinking and workings.

I’ll leave you with one last example that Nancy Duarte shared with me.

Nancy has remarkable creative intuition. She and her team have worked on thousands of the most successful presentations on the planet in the past 30+ years.

She became the authority on storytelling with her book Resonate and subsequent viral TED talk in 2010 when few business authors had written about storytelling.

She told me that for a really long time, as a business, all they used to have in the form of data was enough customer information to invoice them and plug them into their accounting system.

Creative and business decisions were based on qualitative rather than quantitative data.

“I think that’s when my intuition was honed in. There was no data. You just had to sense, we’re going in THAT direction. When data got more complicated, I think it slowed us down and sometimes numbed our intuition. We’ll come up with a great idea and someone will say, do we have the data to support this decision? Sometimes the best decisions are the counterintuitive ones.” Nancy Duarte

Develop your intuition. Obsess over the problem and your craft. Then follow that intuition, not the data.