Let’s be real: No one makes data-driven decisions
Why our emotions are just as important as data
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities.
Wishing you a great week!
“We’re a data-driven company.”
“I use just the facts to make decisions.”
“It’s important to compartmentalize your feelings and think rationally about problems.”
Somewhere along the way, statements like these became the ultimate signal of seriousness, intelligence, and strategic rigor. They suggest something comforting: that if we just have enough data, the “right” answer will reveal itself, and we’ll have escaped the confusing cloud of pesky emotions pulling us this way and that.
Yeah. It doesn’t work like that.
No one makes data-driven decisions—at least, not how they think they do, and not using the data they think they’re using.
And newsflash: Emotions are data.
As we already covered recently, engaging in rigorous, drawn out decision-making processes gives us better outcomes that are less satisfying, and now here I am telling you that all that logic-based hemming and hawing isn’t even the data-driven process that we think it is.
Let’s get into it.
You can’t decide without emotion
Kevan always tells our clients that most RFP and sales processes are “logical” exercises to justify the emotional decisions that buyers have already made. (Which is why a strong, emotionally resonant brand that creates customer affinity is important!)
While marketing provides a convenient, clear cut example of this phenomenon, the idea of seeking out information that backs up our inherent or unconscious preference for something is widely applicable for any decision-making process.
And we couldn’t decide without emotions even if we tried!
This sounds philosophical, but it’s neurological. Antonio Damasio (whom I just learned about from Michael Pollan’s new book on consciousness) studied patients with damage to their brains’ emotional centers. Their IQ and reasoning were intact, but they would get stuck analyzing options endlessly. They couldn’t choose. Even trivial decisions—what to eat, when to schedule something—became impossible.
Because without emotion, they lost access to an extremely critical piece of subconscious data: a prediction about how they would feel given one choice or another.
When you think about it like that, it makes sense, doesn’t it? To build off the example that Damasio gives in the video linked above, a patient asked to decide where to eat might weigh a less popular and therefore calmer restaurant over a new, popular, but likely crowded alternative. Without the brain’s ability to take into account information like “I’ll feel left out if I skip the new hotspot” or “I feel overwhelmed in crowded/unfamiliar areas,” the brain stops short of being able to actually pull the trigger.
Without emotions, it’s harder to say one choice is better or more important than another. How can we really act in our own interest if we’re ignoring the possibility of being miserable with the most data-backed choice?
Emotions aren’t a “bug” in the decision-making process; they’re kind of the final, tie-breaking vote!
Data doesn’t decide. People do.
If decisions were truly data-driven, the same dataset would produce the same conclusion across people, businesses, governments—you name it.
It obviously doesn’t.
Data requires interpretation, and interpretation is human. Someone’s lived experiences, biases, beliefs, and emotions are filtering:
Which metrics even matter here?
What timeframe or other constraint is relevant?
What’s the definition of a successful outcome?
Which troublesome anomalies or outliers are “noise” and which are assumption-breaking?
^^^ These layers are never neutral!
And we’re not even talking about human fallibility yet: Even when data is clear, we routinely misinterpret probabilities and risk. In other words, we make mistakes or just do a bad job! So while data might feel objective, the way we use it in practice almost never is.
Data-driven decisions vs. motivated reasoning
One of the main ways we “corrupt” the purity of our data-driven decisions is by engaging in something called motivated reasoning.
According to researcher Ziva Kunda:
“…motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes—that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion.”
In other words, our process looks like this:
We have a preference for a certain decision or outcome, maybe even unconsciously.
We go about looking for data to help us make that decision.
We find some data that supports our already desired decision/outcome. We like that!
We preferentially believe or prioritize that data while dismissing or delegitimizing conflicting data.
We call our decision-making process “data-driven” and feel very smart.
It’s not that there’s no data there, but maybe it’s more like…data-backed or data-informed than truly data-driven. It’s maybe not even the worst approach, depending on how trustworthy your sources are! After all, there is rarely a “right” answer, rarely a “best” way to do something, so as long as our sources aren’t exclusively TikTok charlatans and companies trying to sell us the solution to the problem we have, we’re probably learning something valuable.
Real decisions are imperfect. Bummer.
There’s a fantasy version of decision-making where all variables are known (and can be discovered by us), outcomes are predictable rather than dependent on a million contingencies, and tradeoffs are quantifiable. In that world, I guess data could make decisions.
But this is the real world. Context and circumstances and markets move. People behave irrationally. Tradeoffs or opportunity costs are invisible until we have to pay them. And urgency limits how long we can spend in the pondering soup before taking action.
This is where our emotions step in, and I would say they’re stepping in by design to end the torture of uncertainty. Listening to our emotions gives us judgement, conviction, and taste. Relying on our intuition and gut is the internalized result of accumulated experience and expertise.
Data can surface patterns we’d miss, challenge assumptions, reduce uncertainty, and highlight previously unknown risks. But only we can decide what matters, how much risk we can or can’t tolerate, and make peace (or not) with competing priorities.
The real skill isn’t eliminating emotion from decision-making; it’s noticing it and then asking ourselves:
What do I want to be true?
What am I afraid of?
Which metrics am I privileging—and why?
What story am I trying to justify?
Data is just one input among many, and it can never actually “drive.” Only we can do that.
Over to you…
What’s your relationship to your emotions when weighing options? Do you listen to your gut, try to be “objective,” or end up conflicted? We’d love to hear about your experiences!
But wait! There’s more…
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