How can we help senior leaders make better business decisions?

Leaders are paid to make decisions. Whether it’s in the pursuit of growth through new revenue streams and/or improving operational efficiency by enhancing organizational effectiveness.

As business leaders become more senior, the complexity and consequences of their decisions increase, but paradoxically, their access to the right data to make sound judgements diminishes.

Few organizations provide leaders with access to the data and insights they need to effectively run their businesses, often leaving them to make business-critical decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate data.

The limited ability of C-level leaders to access the right data and insights is illustrated by Yoshida’s “Iceberg of Ignorance” (see image), which concludes that senior leaders only have visibility into ~4% of known problems or issues within the average organization. How can we ensure leaders have access to the right data at the right time, empowering them to make the right decisions?

Limited C-level access to problems or issues within an organization is driven by two related factors:

1. Positivity Bias: Employees have a tendency to share more positive than negative data and “spin” negative data to downplay its significance
2. Psychological Safety: Employees observe what data is “safe” to share based on leadership reaction and feedback, often choosing consciously not to share negative data

Reduced decision-making effectiveness results in organizations that are more fragile and less resilient to change – a significant issue in a world where the rate of change is accelerating, projected to be 4x what it is today by 2040.

So how might senior leaders improve organizational resilience? One approach is to deepen organizational engagement through access to data & insights that satisfy 3 key criteria:

1. Real-time vs. historical, providing a view into the present and future vs. the past
2. Leading vs. lagging, providing leaders with the reaction time they need to quickly course-correct
3. Balanced vs. biased, sourced from sales, product & customer experience, finance, and operations teams

By harnessing the right data & insights, senior leaders can develop a business pulse that can be continuously monitored, enabling them to identify and address challenges before they escalate:

1. Organize:Identify data that’s critical to the successful running of the business (i.e. balanced, real-time, leading indicators)
2. Digitize:Democratise Access to data and actionable insights through a single, consistent visualisation tool
3. Automate:Embed logic that drives the appropriate action when data deviates from predetermined parameters (e.g. finance review for margin compression, CX review for elevated call centre response times / reduced first call resolution)
4. Intelligence:Enhance human decision-making with the appropriate human-centred AI capability, continuously optimizing business outcomes over time (see more here)

By acknowledging the importance of access to key data and insights in enabling better decision making, organizations can address current gaps and provide a pathway for senior business leaders to deepen their organizational engagement. By developing a business pulse, organizations can proactively identify and address organizational challenges before they become business critical, improving organizational resilience and unlocking growth.

In a rapidly changing world, EA is partnering with clients to provide access to the data and actionable insights they need to make better business decisions. Our sole focus is on driving business outcomes, designing and deploying growth initiatives and measuring their quantitative impact. Find out how we can help your organization deliver incremental growth today.

Tom Harris, Partner, CCO

June 19^th, 2025