I know I am right

How to deal with opinionated bosses. Ideas from 'Build'

There are times when you know you have deep intuition about an important decision, but really no data to prove whether you are right or not.

I have been there, and I am sure you must have been too.

So, what can we do, especially in cases where one has to convince the boss about certain decisions and you know for sure that the boss doesn’t care about data, but just his/her opinion.

Sharing with you, key atomic ideas from the book Build by Tony Fadell

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You make hundreds of tiny decisions every day, but then there are the critical ones, the ones where you’re trying to predict the future, the ones that will put a lot of resources on the line. In those instances, it’s important to realize what kind of decision you’re faced with:

Data-driven: You can acquire, study, and debate facts and numbers that will allow you to be fairly confident in your choice. These decisions are relatively easy to make and defend and most people on the team can agree on the answer.

Opinion-driven: You have to follow your gut and your vision for what you want to do, without the benefit of sufficient data to guide you or back you up. These decisions are always hard and always questioned—after all, everyone has an opinion.

But data alone doesn’t help solve an opinion-based problem.

Stuck with a boss who doesn’t care about your data?

So, what do you do when you’re stuck with a manager who’s hell-bent on driving off a cliff, ideally while throwing all their money out the window at some consultants?

Or what if you have data but it’s inconclusive—nobody can say for sure where it leads? Or what if you need to convince your team to follow you even though you can’t prove you’re heading in the right direction?

You tell a story.

Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new. It’s what all our big choices ultimately come down to—believing a story we tell ourselves or that someone else tells us.

Creating a believable narrative that everyone can latch on to is critical to moving forward and making hard choices. It’s all that marketing comes down to. It’s the heart of sales.

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Nothing in the world is ever 100 percent sure. Even scientific research with entirely data-based outcomes is actually filled with caveats—we didn’t do this kind of sampling, there was this variant, we need to follow up with this test. The answer may not be the answer.

There’s always a chance we’re wrong. So you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

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As the brilliant, empathetic, refreshingly insightful, and egoless designer Ivy Ross, vice president of hardware design at Google, has said, “It’s not data or intuition; it’s data and intuition.” You need both. You use both. And sometimes the data can only take you so far. In those moments, all you can do is take a leap. Just don’t look down.