The vast majority of corporate decisions are never justified by useful data analysis, before or after the fact. Many are so-analyzed, but usually in ways that

The vast majority of corporate decisions are never justified by useful data analysis, before or after the fact. Many are so-analyzed, but usually in ways that anyone who paid attention in high school science or stats classes can tell are so flawed that they’re meaningless. We can’t even measure manager efficacy to any useful degree, in nearly all cases. We can come up with numbers, but they don’t mean anything. Good luck with anything more complex. Very small organizations can probably manage to isolate enough variables to know how good or bad some move was in hindsight, if they try and are competent at it (… if). Sometimes an effect is so huge for a large org that it overwhelms confounders and you can be pretty confident that it was at least good or bad, even if the degree is fuzzy. Usually, no. Big organizations are largely flying blind. This has only gotten worse with the shift from people-who-know-the-work-as-leadership to professional-managers-as-leadership.