During the past two years, I’ve had a front-row seat watching our customers embrace data to make bold decisions faster and pivot in remarkable ways. For example, Wahl Clipper, a 100-year-old grooming company, not only used real-time data to get ahead of the home haircut trend but also discovered that 30% of consumers were not going back to a barber post-pandemic.
Those insights represent big opportunities for Wahl on a global scale and continue to deliver important data for future decisions. The lesson that every business and brand, big and small, can take away is this: Success goes hand-in hand with insights, faster (and more confident) decision-making, and innovation.
Today, business leaders have big plans, but are navigating through a volatile and complicated landscape filled with societal, economic, and geopolitical disruptions. Looming over every leader’s bold agenda is the fact that no brand or business is immune from doing business in today’s feedback economy. From Peloton to Spotify, we’ve learned every consumer is an activist, and they’re using their power to sway markets at unprecedented speed. The volume of high-impact decisions leaders and teams will have to make has increased, and they need to be made faster than ever before.
To understand the state of decision-making, we asked more than 1,700 business leaders how they approach everyday decisions and watershed moments. Here’s what they had to say.
BUSINESS LEADERS FACE DECISION-MAKING “IMPASSES”
The good news is that 97% of business leaders are confident in the decisions they make, but 51% often or sometimes experience decision-making “impasses,” citing lack of data and insights and inability to accurately measure outcomes.
This trend is consistent with a study Momentive ran in January 2022, where six in 10 business decision-makers said they’re experiencing decision-making impasses too. “Business decision-makers are juggling a lot in terms of managing timelines, people, and more specifically, the data and inputs that go into making decisions,” said Sam Gutierrez, research scientist, Momentive. In working with global businesses and brands daily, I also see that speed to insights is a top challenge to faster decision-making.
The data challenge is layered: 42% of business leaders say they don’t have enough data or information to make proper decisions, and 28% are lacking tools to gain insights. For those with a data-rich environment, 49% indicated they struggle to create actionable insights from the data they have.
MIND THE GAP: SENIOR LEADER VS. MID-LEVEL DISCONNECT
In our research, we asked business leaders how confident they were in their leadership team’s decision-making. Overall, 81% of business leaders affirmed they feel “confident,” but there’s more nuance to this finding. When we look at what the C-suite thinks versus what mid-level managers feel, there is a disconnect. While 89% of senior leaders (VP and C-suite) are confident in the decisions their leadership teams are making, only 77% of mid-level leaders agree.
Are senior leaders too overconfident in their abilities (and those of their team)? And why are mid-level leaders feeling less confident? Whether it’s strategy misalignment, lack of insights, or pace of decision-making, our full report will provide more context about the disconnect.
LEARN MORE, ACT FASTER: LEADERS INCREASE USE OF AI TO ENHANCE DECISION-MAKING
As AI adoption accelerates across the enterprise, leaders are embracing this advanced technology for business decision-making. Our study revealed that 70% of business leaders are using AI and ML to generate insights as input for company decision-making, and 49% say that this represents an increase in adoption and use of such tools since the start of the pandemic.
In these dynamic times, AI is becoming increasingly indispensable to business decision-making. In a study we ran earlier this year, 47% of business decision-makers say AI, ML, and automation are very important to the future of their organization, and 74% plan to increase investment in these technologies during the next five years.
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE: INSIGHTS EMPOWER LEADERS TO MAKE BOLDER DECISIONS
For leaders, there’s never been a better time to pursue a bold agenda. Yes, you can count on more disruption, but the past two years have expanded our sense of what can be achieved and proven that transformation doesn’t take years.
In an environment of constant change, making bold and faster decisions will help your company achieve success and outpace the competition. It’s time for organizations and leaders to have the insights needed to make decisions at the speed of business—and make their bold vision a reality.
Making high-impact decisions in fast-changing industries was never easy, but to succeed in today’s new landscape it’s critical that business leaders get it right. And now, leaders can combine the power of AI with human judgment to enhance, accelerate, and scale bold decision-making to make an impact and shape what’s next.
Ken Ewell is chief customer officer at Momentive