I've talked before about how data driven decisions are about more than just the numbers, but I want to spend a bit more time on what that actually looks like in practice, because I think this is where a lot of the real insight gets missed.
When people hear data driven, they usually picture spreadsheets, sales figures, customer counts, growth percentages. All useful, all worth tracking, and all genuinely part of the picture. But there's another layer of data that gets overlooked far too often, simply because it's harder to measure.
I'm talking about things like whether a decision or a situation is giving you energy or taking it away. Whether it leaves you feeling excited about what's ahead or quietly overwhelmed by it. What your actual lived experience has been with a particular person, project or process, not the assumption you're carrying about it, but the real pattern you've noticed over time.
These are data points, plain and simple. They just don't come with a number attached, which is exactly why they're so easy to dismiss in a room full of people who are more comfortable with hard figures.
I'd encourage you to start noticing these signals in yourself and in your team, and to treat them with the same seriousness you'd give a sales report. If someone on your team consistently feels drained after working with a particular client, that's worth paying attention to. If a project keeps leaving people excited rather than exhausted, that's worth understanding too, so you can replicate whatever is working.
None of this replaces the logical, quantitative side of decision making. It sits alongside it. The most well-informed decisions I see are the ones where both sets of data are given a genuine seat at the table, rather than one being treated as real and the other as a nice to have.
