"You don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing" - Bob Dylan
I heard this on my ipod the other day and it got me thinking. In business you can often get to "analysis paralysis". By this I mean where leaders only make decisions when they have a full set of data, a fully developed business model, risk assessment models, etc etc.
In many cases making decisions on a well research data set is the right thing to do.
Yet there comes a point where gathering more information is not going to get give you significantly more insight.
Example: for usability testing, Jakob Neilson has shown that it only takes five users to give you enough information to work from. See his article Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users. Five users can identify 80% of the usability problems. To get 100%, you need to test 15 users. You can get working quicker on resolving the issues if you just test 5, fix them, and then re-test.
Going back to Bob Dylan. The point is this... you can't predict the weather without specific data, but you can predict the seasons. Summer always follows spring, and it's usually warmer. You know this from your experience. Your experience feeds your intuition.
The role of your experience in decision making is considered in more detail by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Blink". See my recommended reading post for more details.
If you have experience in an area, sometimes you just need to take a view and go with it. You'll probably be right.
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