Is Too Much Data Causing Decision Distress Among Business Leaders?
As more businesses turn to ChatGPT, Oracle CloudWorld Tour tapped Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times bestselling author, to conduct research including a survey of more than 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries to better understand how people are making decisions in personal and professional lives.
According to a new study, called “The Decision Dilemma,” people are being forced to make more decisions than ever and instead of feeling relief in data meant to help them, they are feeling overwhelmed. The data makes decisions much more complicated, damaging trust and negatively impacting a person’s quality of life.
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Nearly 75 percent of survey respondents report that the number of daily decisions they make has increased by 10 over the past three years alone, with 78 percent reporting feeling bombarded with more data from more sources than ever. For 86 percent, this volume of data is making professional and personal decisions much more complicated, and 59 percent say at least once a day they don’t know what decision to make.
“People are drowning in data,” said Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of “Everybody Lies” and “Don’t Trust Your Gut.” “This study highlights how the overwhelming amount of inputs a person gets in their average day — internet searches, news alerts, unsolicited comments from friends — frequently add up to more information than the brain is configured to handle.”
Looking at business leaders specifically, the study found that 85 percent have suffered from decision distress, regretting, feeling guilty about or questioning a decision they made in the past year. An additional 93 percent also say they believe “having the right type of decision intelligence can make or break the success of an organization.”
Almost all business leaders surveyed (97 percent) say they want help from data, reporting that in an ideal world, they want data to help them: make better decisions (44 percent), reduce risk (41 percent), make faster decisions (39 percent), make more money (37 percent) and plan for the unexpected (29 percent). However, many respondents (72 percent) also admit the sheer volume of data and their lack of trust in data has stopped them from making any decision at all and 89 percent believe the growing number of data sources has limited the success of their organizations.
With these challenges and increased decisions in mind, 93 percent of respondents said they have made changes to the way they make decisions over the last three years, with nearly 40 percent saying they only listen to sources they deem trustworthy and nearly 30 percent saying they rely solely on gut feelings.
Some People, Stephens-Davidowitz said, “are tempted to throw out the confusing, and sometimes conflicting, data and just do what feels right. But this can be a big mistake. It has been proven over and over again that our instincts can lead us astray and the best decision-making is done with a proper understanding of the relevant data. Finding a way to get a handle on the stream of data at their fingertips, to help businesses distinguish between the signal and the noise, is a crucial first step.”
Further, the survey found that business leaders do not believe that the current approach to data and analytics is addressing these challenges, with 77 percent saying the dashboards or charts they see do not always relate directly to the problem they are solving and 72 percent saying they believe most of the data available is only truly helpful for IT professionals or data scientists.
“As businesses expand to serve new customers in new ways, the number of data inputs they need to get the full picture expands, too. Business leaders that make critical decisions about how to manage their companies ignore that data at their own risk,” said T.K. Anand, executive vice president of Oracle Analytics. “The hesitancy, distrust and lack of understanding of data shown by this study indicates that many people and organizations need to rethink their approach to data and decision-making. What people really need is to be able to connect data to insight to decision to action.”
Further, he said, with Oracle’s span of connected cloud capabilities, ranging from foundational data management to augmented and applied analytics, to our suite of operational applications, Oracle is “uniquely positioned to meet this need.”
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