Intuition First – Then Analysis

Seth Godin wrote an interesting piece on the tradeoff between intuition and analysis.  While it was insightful, I view things slightly differently.  I don’t think there is a tradeoff between intuition and analysis as he claims.  I think intuition drives the ideas that should be implemented and then after implementation the results must be analyzed.  Prioritizing the order in which ideas are implemented requires an additional level of intuition or gut instinct.  However, careful analysis of the results will provide guidance whether an idea should be killed or if it should be further developed and financed.

When I discover people on my marketing team debating an idea I always step in and just say “test it”.  Subjective differences are very hard to overcome via debate and debate over ideas is often a waste of time. However, once we prototype an idea, test it and have some hard data it is much easier to agree on a future course of action.  One of my key marketing team members is a data analyst who previously worked as an actuary, so he is very helpful in evaluating the data.