Intuition Isn’t Enough: What CEOs Need to Survive in the Current Climate

 By Satish Thiagarajan, founder and CEO of Digital Transformation Consultancy, Brysa

The role of CEO is changing. It’s no longer enough to be bold, decisive, and driven by intuition. In today’s environment of relentless disruption and scrutiny, one wrong move can see you – and your business – come tumbling down. To survive as CEO, you need something more. And that something is data. Experience counts, of course it does. But intuition isn’t always perfect.

Why intuition isn’t always enough

You don’t have to look far into the annals of business history to find examples of leaders who led with their instinct and came to regret it. From Kodak to Nokia, they stuck to what they knew, ignoring the emerging data trends, and lost billions in market value – as well as relevance – as a result. The thing is, it’s not necessarily intuition to blame; it’s the willingness to ignore data. And when you do that, you open your business to a plethora of potential errors and costs, from capital misallocation and slower response to disruption (this latter was the case for Kodak, combined with overconfidence bias), to regulatory and compliance risks, and a loss of talent and culture. When you combine gut-based decisions and data, that’s when you get the formula right.

With data, instinct becomes defensible strategies. Uncertainty can become opportunity. And hunches can become informed action. Because data isn’t just validation, it expands a CEO’s perspective, providing predictive models and forecasts, risk assessment and scenario planning pressure-test options, and a genuine breakdown of KPIs, dashboards, and metrics, enabling informed decision-making that can stand up to scrutiny. The question is, how do you get the right data?

What tools do CEOs really need?

It’s all very well saying that you need data to make intuition valuable, but business tech is constantly evolving, and keeping pace with that can be incredibly tough. Knowing which tools you need can simplify a CEO’s work considerably.

CRM Systems

Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is basically the backbone of decision-making. There are various models you can use – Salesforce, Monday, Microsoft Dynamics – but whichever you opt for, its role is to consolidate customer data, track interactions across different functions, provide a clear view of pipeline health and client satisfaction, and deliver actionable insights about customer behaviour. By anticipating customer and business needs, it can identify growth opportunities quickly, supporting strategic decision-making.

Reporting and analytics tools

Raw data can be heavy work. Reporting and analytics tools transform raw data into digestible insights. With tools like Tableau and Power BI, you can monitor KPIs in real time and focus on the things that need attention. Helping you to see through the fog of complexity to clearly valuate operations and measure success.

Predictive analytics and forecasting tools

No one can see the future, but with tools such as Salesforce Einstein Analytics helping you to leverage historical and real-time data to forecast trends and market shifts, you’re as close as you’re ever going to be to soothsaying. They allow you to take a proactive approach to risk, resource allocation, and potential opportunities. 

Collaboration tool

This isn’t so much about decision making as ensuring that when decisions are made they are shared and operationalised across the organisation. With tools like Slack or Salesforce Chatter you can ensure that your leadership team are always on the same page. And it’s not just the CEO who benefits – when rolled out across the business, collaboration tools have a role within all teams, ensuring open, traceable communication.

A dashboard tool

Tools are only useful if they are monitored, so to stay on top of your metrics, you need a dashboard that highlights the metrics that are relevant to you. Whether that’s financial indicators, audience engagement, or sustainability targets. Your KPIs are unique to your business, you don’t need me to spell them out to you. But you do need to monitor them in order to create a single source of truth for your business, which is where tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Google Looker Studio come in, integrating all of the different moving parts of your business.

Intuition is a powerful thing, driven by years of experience. It’s how many CEOs rose to their current position, bringing the gut and gusto they needed to power through. But in today’s business environment, where transparency is everything and everyone is accountable, data also has to play a part. Because while nobody is saying that there’s no longer a need for intuition, data not only validates decisions but accelerates them, allowing CEOs to check the cogency of their hunches, to adjust their plans according to the facts, and to expose their decisions to scrutiny with confidence, certain that they are always acting in the best interests of their company.