It's hard to ignore numbers. They tell a story, paint a landscape. Not necessarily of what will happen, but definitely of what has happened or how what the state of things are. For example, if I am an app developer, and I only have the resources, starting out, to develop my app for either iOS or Android, having a statistic sitting in front of me that says more people use Android than iOS, that will greatly sway my decision. Developing for one or the other affects the number of people my app is available to.
On the other hand, there are areas that analysis simply won't fill. Henry Ford said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, "Faster horses!" He didn't have a number in front of him. But reason and problem solving, rather than statistical analysis, led him to developing the car. He just knew it would catch on.
I tend to lean on analysis for decisions. We recently had some shirts printed, and we polled on Facebook asking which shirt they would want out of five options. Since then, we've seen the number one shirt, having ordered it, flies off our table.
In the end, I think that each has its place, and each, in that proper place and in conjunction with the other, will lead you to growth.
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