My Gut Tells Me You May Not Like This Post

by Matt Monge

All of you out there who blog know there are some posts that everyone else in the world is going to think are rubbish. Absolute rubbish. (You’ll just have to imagine my British accent there.) Today’s may or may not be one of those for you.

Data is a thing. (No, Trekkies, not that Data.)

Intuition is a thing.

Hunches are things.

Logic is a thing.

Rational thinking is a thing.

Information is a thing. (Al Gore invented a superhighway for it, you know)

Obviously I’ve over-simplified the above, but the point is that all of these “things” are what we use to make decisions every day, be it as leaders; team members; family members; friends; neighbors; patrons at local eateries like Foo’s Fabulous Frozen Custard, the Roasterie or Dodge City Distillery; or consumers at online retailers like Amazon or Zappos. Heck, we use those things to determine our philosophical outlook on life itself to some degree, which determines the lens through which we view reality in many ways.

And just because it’s important to me — please note that we talked about frozen custardand philosophy in the same paragraph above. On what other blog…

The tricky part with all of those things above is that they’re interrelated and often interdependent, and there’s no universal standard that tells us how much weight we’re to assign to any of those particular things. What if logic seems to tell me one thing, but the numbers don’t appear to bear it out? What if the data points in one direction, but your intuition is pulling you in the other? What if all the experts are saying to do this or that, but you have a hunch that this other thing — different that the this-or-that that the experts have suggested — would be an even better solution?

And there’s the rub.

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