Why Your Gut Instinct is Sabotaging Your Small Business (And How to Stop It)

We love to glorify the entrepreneur who operates on pure instinct. But the math tells a brutal story.

Ronny Kohavi, a pioneer of experimentation at Amazon and Microsoft, often conducts a live test during his talks. He displays two versions of a website (Test A and Test B) and asks the audience to guess which one performed better.

The result? Total chaos. No one agrees. Even the experts get it wrong.

Why? Because data beats intuition. Always.

If you think your gut is sharper than the rest, consider these terrifying statistics from industry leaders:

• According to digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik, we are wrong about what the customer wants 80% of the time.

• Even experts with 5 years of A/B testing experience admit they only guess the winning result 33% of the time. You’d have better odds flipping a coin!

As a small business owner, you don’t have Microsoft’s budget. You cannot afford to be wrong 80% of the time on expensive campaigns based on a "hunch." The arrogance of expertise is expensive.

So, what now? Should you stop making decisions?

No. You need to change the way you make them. The most successful entrepreneurs aren't the ones who know everything; they are the ones humble enough to admit they don't know.

Schrage calls this "embracing your ignorance."

Instead of blowing thousands of dollars on a launch because you are sure it will work, become a scientist. The best innovators run experiments precisely because they know they cannot predict the outcome.