Big data on its own is meaningless. Human intuition on its own is deeply flawed and full of blind spots. But taken together, they can help us gain deep insights into complex systems. We can better navigate the political landscape, design a better car, figure out which of ten possible strategies is most likely to succeed. It’s not a question of “either/or”, says Michael Slaby, who wrestled with some of the most complex and fast-changing data sets imaginable as Chief Innovation Officer for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign. It’s a question of applying intuition and big data in the ways they work best.Balance intuition and dataIntuition helps us ask a question or form a hypothesis about what we want to measure. Intuition is bad for extrapolating our micro-scale experience to larger scales.Data gives us the ability to aggregate, allowing us to see larger systems more effectively than we do in our own heads.Strive to quantifyAvoid using intuition as a crutch. When something ...