More Intelligence is the Wrong Goal
Intelligence alone is not going to make your organization better. It’s not going to cut costs, improve revenue, increase automation, or solve complex production problems. What matters is how you turn intelligence into profit by taking the right actions. That requires making good decisions. We all know intelligent people who make terrible decisions. AI does too. No matter how super artificial intelligence gets, it can still make terrible decisions.
More data won’t do it either. Nor will perfectly clean data. That ERP migration project you’ve been working on for the last 18 months? It’s not going to fix the problem. The holy grail of clean data never materializes. The real world is messy and constantly changes. It’s not how real decisions get made anyway. Data-driven decision making is the wrong goal.
Real decision making is done by people who define an objective, gather data, use their experience, balance tradeoffs, take a guess, learn from it, and do it again. In their heads. Over and over and over again until they get good at it. This is how organizations actually run.
More intelligence can make that process better. Better data can too. But the organization still has to define the objective, decide which tradeoffs it will accept, and make clear who has the authority to act. Buying more intelligence doesn’t remove that responsibility. The goal is to improve the decisions you make with it.
Organizations that get better do it by making more of the right decisions. They increase their capacity both for decision making and capacity to repeatedly make the right decisions. That means handling more decisions without letting them stall, and making the evidence, alternatives and reasoning behind them clear enough to evaluate before the results arrive. Improved Decision Capacity is the goal. Get this right and you can improve profitability. Your organization will get better.
How? Start with a clearly defined objective. Map the decision, rules, regulations. Think through the tradeoffs. Make clear who makes the call and who acts on it. Document it. Connect relevant, and only relevant, data where you have it. Use synthetic data where you don’t. Run a simulation, get a recommendation. Use your judgement to give feedback on it. Make the decision. Measure the result. Objective achieved? Good, save that as a repeatable Decision Model and go on to the next one. Objective not achieved? Keep iterating until you do, then save it as a repeatable Decision Model and go on to the next one.
Connect all those Decision Models together. Now you have a Decision Enterprise. Get this process out of people’s heads and into an Enterprise Decision Operating System. Now you can make your organization better.
That might sound hard, but good news: we’ve already built it for you. Kimaru is the Enterprise Decision Operating System. We’d be happy to show you how it works and build that first Decision Model with you. Starting with one repeatable, high-value Decision Model and growing from there. Contact us to get started!