Adapt or Die

What's the best decision-making tool in your toolkit? I'm genuinely interested?

Is it a crystal ball? Is it your intuition? Maybe you've had some design thinking education OR you do that crazy thing, 'talking to your customers' like my last email.

If you're just running off a crystal ball, intuition or what some would call your 'experience', a stupid metric, I think you should be taken out the back...and told never to come back.

The Brisbane Broncos hired 3 data analysts in 2021. Not 1 as a test to see if they could get results. THREE.

The Broncos' new CEO immediately saw the need, because over the past decade the Broncos have seen their player quality absolutely decimated by other teams, leaving the team finishing dead last in 2019.

The new CEO was a CEO at one of the clubs doing the poaching from the same pool of talent, so the Broncos hired him.

I've seen this in baseball too. Remember MoneyBall? A true story of a baseball team decimated by big money poaching their best players.

Peter Brand was signed to the Oakland Athletics (aka Oakland A's). Not to play, but to be the best data analyst in the game. The A's scouts were pissed.

"you've got a scout here with 29 years experience, you're listening to an economics major?" - Oakland A's Head Scout 2001 (in the movie)

"Adapt or die" - Billy Beane Oakland's GM