Data should inform our decisions, but data rarely sparks truly creative thoughts. Those 'leaps' often seem to come out of nowhere.

Our instincts are not just random junk. They are subconscious evaluation processes tuned my millions of years of evolution, particularly in the area of dealing with other humans (whether others in an organization, or customers (marketing) or competitors) friends or enemies. Various experiments have found that we can be remarkably accurate in our evalutation of others, even though a popular theme of movies is the person 'everyone is wrong about'.

The best judgement comes from a synthesis of honest data and instinct.