Leveraging The Power of Snap Judgement in Data Science and Advanced Analytics

Snap judgment is the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in a situation instantly and decoding the “truth” about the situation. Finding minimalist patterns of information and filtering out noise at fraction of a second is called thin-slicing.

Thin-slicing disqualifies irrelevant information, which often adds to uncertainty in decision-making. In a research study, it has been found that the cardiologists who were able to make correct decisions with little information, started questioning their own correct decisions when provided more information about the patients.

One acquires the skill of snap judgment through experience overtime in an enabling environment. Those who possess and apply snap judgment often cannot explain the underlying process of it.

Snap Judgement in Data Science and Advanced Analytics

Snap judgment has a very important role to play in the data science profession. Data professionals are often able to draw snap judgment based on brainstorming with business partners, and/or results of exploratory data analysis. Those judgment(s) mostly do not get shared with the business because they would be hard to explain through writings or presentations.

Enabling Environment for Snap Judgements

1. Build trust in the team between data scientists and business partners

2. Start data science discovery and get snap judgment(s) from data scientists

3. Let data scientists share their judgments without getting too much into technical details

4. During this process, the business may have its own snap judgment(s).

5. If not the business and data science judgments differ, the team should sit on the disagreement and try to come up with the next set of snap judgments by going into phase 2 of data discovery