In my consulting work I am permanently astonished how much people tend to take decisions based on opinions without even taking a few hours to establish some quick facts about the situation.
Of course we all know that at the end we tend to take decisions based on our feelings, and that over-analysis is not good. However in the professional field it is astonishing to see how many substantial decisions impacting many people are taken with limited analysis or basic fact checking about orders of magnitude. A common example in my speciality is project scheduling, and scheduling forecast. It is quite easy to establish the current slippage of a schedule and the current productivity level compared to the expectations. Decision-makers do not even take a few minutes to establish those facts.
As a consultant a substantial part of my job is to establish some of those facts to question the worldview of decision-makers. And by doing that I am often disturbing because I often invalidate well established opinions. Up to the point that I often need backing by top management for those exercises.
Please take a few minutes to gather some basic facts and orders of magnitude before taking decisions. It would so greatly improve a number of situations. It is astonishing how many bad decisions are taken without basic fact-checking.
