Law Department Management Blog
An article in the Harvard Business Review, June 2014, at 67, by Clayton Christensen and another author, includes a sidebar that criticizes overuse of spreadsheets. When strategic decisions are based on spreadsheet analysis, the authors believe managers are often misguided.
Without a doubt, spreadsheets can mislead or can create a false sense of certainty. Nevertheless, efforts to gather data and look at what that data suggest help combat the well-known shortcomings of intuition, selectively-remembered experience, and less-than-rational gut instinct.
More than that point, spreadsheets require data, and the discussions that should result from deciding which data to collect and how to collect it and then how to weight the various pieces of data should help planners think through future scenarios. Data has value in its own right, that is to say, as well as value in stimulating thinking.