Ignorance is not good enough

One of the lessons to emerge from the Coronavirus situation is the need for governments to adopt an evidence-based decision-making strategy.

Businesses, too, should make decisions based on firm evidence and reliable metrics. Gone are the days of decision-making by whim or by gut feel (unless you sore president of the USA, of course).

This means that in the good times, businesses need to establish the measurement regimes that will provide the data and the metrics in the bad times.

if we have reliable measures in place, we can see trends (so we have a better understanding of the future) and make predictions.

Of course there will still bee uncertainties - but remember  there old adage…. what really hurts you the most are not the things that you know or the things that you don’t know - but the things that you don’t know you don’t know. If you know where your knowledge is lacking, you might be able to fill the gaps with interpolation (or  extrapolation) from known data … but if you don’t know what you don’t know,. you obviously don’t know you need to fill in the gaps.

Ignorance may be bliss - but it is a poor foundation on which to base long-term planning and decision-making. You must seek evidence!