Delaney’s Data

“How do you spell “pierce,” Delaney asked her dad.  Once getting it right, she disappeared.

She is the cutest and smartest seven year old you could possibly meet and I get to call her my niece.  She was contemplating an earlier discussion she had with her mom about the possibility of getting her ears pierced during her next doctor check-up and wanted more data. When she was next found, she was on the internet watching videos of kids getting their ears pierced and tracking how many of the little girls cried versus not.  She had divided a paper into halves and her research data indicated that about half the girls cried.  Ultimately the data did not prove or disprove her intuition.

Leaders need to have great intuition and vision to be successful. They also need a way to test their theories to understand the resulting success probability and/or the nature and difficulty of obstacles they must overcome.  Leaders who master the ability to visualize and test intuitions are likely to increase their chances of success and have the backing of the teams they lead.

Do you have a track record of testing your hypothesis?  How do you do it?