I asked Anupam Khare, the CIO of Oshkosh Corporation, a question that sounds like it’s about analytics and is actually about power: “When it comes to using data for decision making, how do you make sure that an executive or a business leader’s experience — which is to say their bias — doesn’t overshadow what the data is saying?”
Notice the trap inside the question. We assume the data is neutral and the executive is the problem. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes the executive’s “bias” is twenty years of pattern recognition the dataset hasn’t lived long enough to learn, and the data is a beautifully formatted record of a world that no longer exists.
So the real question isn’t data versus experience. It’s this: in your building, when the two disagree, who wins — and was that ever a decision, or just a habit?
Look at it through the SPICE lenses — Strategy, Politics, Innovation, Culture, Execution:
Strategy. Data and experience answer different questions. Data tells you what happened at scale; experience tells you which parts of what happened actually mattered. A strategy that crowns either one permanently is a strategy with a blind spot by design. The manufacturers who get this right treat the disagreement itself as the signal — when the dashboard and the veteran diverge, that’s not noise. That’s the exact spot where the decision deserves a second hour.
Politics. Let’s be honest about why data usually loses. The person with the experience has the title, the budget, and the relationship with the CEO. The data has a PDF. “My gut says otherwise” is rarely an analytical position — it’s a veto held by someone who has never had to write down what their gut is based on. And here’s the part nobody says in the meeting: executives don’t reject data because they distrust it. They reject it because accepting it would mean a past decision — theirs — was wrong.
Innovation. The genuinely innovative move isn’t a better dashboard. It’s a decision protocol: a standing rule that says when a model and a senior leader conflict above a certain dollar threshold, both sides state their reasoning in writing before the call is made. Oshkosh’s framing — moving from data-driven to data-rich decision making — points the same way. The innovation is in enriching the decision, not automating the decider.
Culture. In most organizations, the career-safe move is to agree with the senior person’s experience and quietly let the data die in an appendix. So that’s what people do, and then leadership wonders why the analytics investment never changed a single outcome. Culture is what happens to the analyst who brings the inconvenient chart. Promote that person once — publicly — and you’ll get honesty for a decade. Bury the chart once, and you’ll get decoration forever.
Execution. So here’s the machinery: pick your ten most consequential recurring decisions. For each one, write down — in advance — what evidence would override the senior person’s judgment, and what experience would legitimately override the model. Review the disagreements quarterly: who won, and were they right? You now have something almost no company has: a track record for both your data and your executives’ instincts. Most leaders grade only one of those.
Today, the winner is decided by seniority and the loser is decided by silence. Tomorrow, the winners will be the companies that made the disagreement a governed event instead of a hallway war.
Ask yourself: in your last big decision, did the data lose an argument — or was it never actually allowed to make one?
Sources
CXOTalk, “Digital Transformation: Investment Strategy at Oshkosh Corp.” — my question to Anupam Khare on data vs. executive experience: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/digital-transformation-investment-strategy-oshkosh-corp
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