What If We Could Make Better Decisions?

Businesses have never had more data. Dashboards update in real time. AI tools summarise reports in seconds. Analytics platforms promise insight at the push of a button. And yet organisations still make poor decisions. So what if the problem isn’t the data at all?

At Bath Digital Festival, data storyteller Sam Knowles explores one of the most overlooked challenges in modern organisations: the quality of our decision-making. Sam is the founder of Insight Agents, a consultancy that sits at the intersection of data, psychology, and storytelling. His work focuses on the gap between what organisations know and what they actually do with that knowledge. As he puts it, it’s the emotional brain that makes decisions, while the rational brain follows later with justification.

He is the author of three books on the subject, including Narrative by Numbers, How to Be Insightful and Asking Smarter Questions, each exploring how better questions and better stories help organisations turn information into action. In this keynote, Sam introduces a new idea he is developing: a framework for decision-making quality. Because while there are thousands of tools designed to analyse data, very few focus on the quality of the decisions themselves.

His model, called CLEAR, looks at five dimensions of better decisions: clarity of the problem, the range of options considered, the strength of evidence, accountability for the decision, and the ability to review outcomes and learn from them. Each dimension is independent of the others.

CLEAR challenges the common assumption in the age of AI and dashboards: that more data and smarter analytics automatically lead to better choices. Instead, Sam argues we face something else entirely. Not a crisis of information, but a crisis of curiosity. For Bath Digital Festival’s “What If?” theme, this session asks a deceptively simple question: what if improving the quality of our decisions became a skill organisations actively measured, tested, and improved?

Join us for an interactive and engaging keynote about data, curiosity, and why the most powerful technology in any organisation may still be human judgement.

Who should attend?

This keynote is for anyone who makes decisions using data or technology - in high or low data environments - which in practice means most of us.

It will be particularly relevant for:

• Founders and startup leaders who are constantly making strategic decisions with incomplete information.
• Product managers, analysts, and data teams responsible for turning dashboards and reports into meaningful action.
• Technology leaders and digital teams navigating rapid change and complex trade-offs.
• Marketing and strategy professionals working to turn insight into impact.
• Anyone curious about how AI, data, and human judgement can work together.

If you’ve ever sat in a meeting surrounded by charts and dashboards and still wondered what decision should actually be made, this session is tailor-made for you. Because the real challenge in the data age is not collecting information. It is making better decisions with it.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher TechSPARK