You’re a senior executive who has relied on your intuition and experience for years to come up with new innovative projects, and they've served you well.
You've drawn from your background, sought consensus among team members and stakeholders, and analyzed market trends.
However, with increasing stakes and complex challenges, you recognize that these approaches may no longer suffice.
Doubts linger: Are you overlooking critical evidence? Are biases distorting your judgment?
While personal experiences and anecdotal evidence can offer valuable insights, excessive reliance on them may narrow your perspective and lead to flawed decisions. This reliance often overlooks the need for a systematic evaluation of the quality and relevance of the evidence at hand.
This is especially critical in the social impact sector. Systemic issues demand a comprehensive and nuanced approach, particularly from those directly affected. Failing to challenge assumptions or implementing misguided solutions can exacerbate harm to vulnerable populations.
Yet it’s not about eliminating intuition. Rather my suggestion is to harness it correctly by pairing it with a systematic approach that rapidly improves your decision-making.
I propose the Evidence Quality Ladder as a pragmatic approach to decision-making. Evidence quality refers to the fidelity and relevance of information to your specific problem or target market.
A common pitfall in improving evidence quality is the tendency to aim for the most rigorous tests immediately.
For instance, while prototyping or a large statistically-significant sample can provide robust evidence, these often demand significant upfront resources and investment.
In contrast, our approach suggests that you go up “one rung” in the evidence quality ladder, given the decision’s importance, risk, and current evidence quality.
Here’s a visual depiction of the evidence ladder, with the apex representing higher levels of quality.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the above.