For the past decade, corporate transformation has been treated like a technical equation. More dashboards, more data, more AI. More reports that pile up faster than leaders can interpret them. Somewhere along the way, organizations began to mistake the volume of information for the quality of their decisions.
Jen McCorkle remembers the exact moment she realized this system was broken.
She was advising a subscription based company whose executives were preparing to celebrate a triumph. “We have half a million subscribers!”, the finance team reported. It felt like a milestone worth broadcasting. The CEO drafted messaging and the press team prepared to go wide.
Except the number was wrong.
“When I actually went into the database, it did not add up,” McCorkle recalls. “We did not even have five hundred thousand people in the system.” The financial systems was set up in a way that made multiple subscriptions look like multiple human beings. The system failed to account for the reality that a single individual could in fact have multiple subscriptions.The marketing team believed they had half a million individuals. The executives believed they were scaling faster than they were. And the public messaging went out before anyone caught the difference.
“The gap between what leaders think they are seeing and what the data is actually telling them is one of the biggest risks inside companies,” she says.
McCorkle has spent more than thirty years working inside that gap. She is a veteran data strategist, leadership coach, and the creator of Decision Forensics™, a new discipline that brings the rigor of forensic accounting to the way organizations make and evaluate decisions. Through her company, The Decision Advantage™, she partners with enterprise leaders to move away from reactive decision cycles and toward a structured system of traceability, evidence, insight, and human judgment.
Her work began with a simple question: Why do organizations invest millions in analytics programs and still make poor decisions?
The Turning Point
The answer revealed itself repeatedly across her career. Leaders believed they were more data fluent than they were. Teams made decisions on incomplete information, outdated reports, or dashboards that were misunderstood. AI generated recommendations were taken at face value without a human filter capable of catching the errors that machine learning still fails to anticipate.
“Everyone is talking about AI fluency, but AI fluency doesn’t matter if you cannot evaluate the quality of the input,” McCorkle says. “People think they know how to use data. They overestimate their skills. They assume the information in front of them is correct. They don’t realize the decision has already been compromised.”
To her, the missing piece was not gathering more data. It was a way to understand the psychology, the process, and the chain of events that produce a decision.
“I watch a lot of forensic shows,” she laughs. “The thing I love is the cues, the signals, all the small details that explain the why. Strategy never had an equivalent. So, I built one.”
Where AI Ends and Human Judgment Begins
Decision Forensics™ is built on that premise. It functions as a traceability system that documents the evidence, assumptions, inputs, risks, and strategic context that shape a decision in real time. It includes tools like the Decision Autopsy, the Decision Clarity Diagnostic, and a Decision Register that tracks how much of a choice was based on data, AI, gut, experience, or assumption.
In an age where companies rely on AI for everything, from customer segmentation to pricing strategy, McCorkle believes leaders desperately need a way to “catch the hallucinations” before they compound into multimillion dollar mistakes.
“AI is fast, but it is not wise,” she says. “Decision Forensics™ is the structure that helps humans bring wisdom back into the process.”
Why Analytics Programs Have Failed
For McCorkle, the failure of traditional analytics programs comes down to three interconnected problems.
First, data quality and integration. “You cannot make good decisions on bad data. It does not matter how aligned your team is if the information is flawed.”
Second, misalignment between business teams and analytics teams. Leaders ask for a report. Analysts generate it. No one discusses the purpose behind the request. As a result, the insight is incomplete or irrelevant.
Third, the absence of an internal system that tracks decision inputs, not just outcomes. “Organizations are trying to move faster, but speed without structure creates chaos,” she says.
When all three problems are active, leaders shift priorities weekly, teams lose focus, and employees become cynical. “People get burned out. They stop taking direction seriously because they know the priority will change next week,” she explains.
What a Better Decision Looks Like
McCorkle measures the return on decision using metrics that most leadership teams do not currently track. Time spent. Alignment across teams. Frequency of reprioritization. Resource churn. Implementation speed. And the quality of the evidence behind each decision.
“When leaders are aligned and the data is right, companies stop losing time to constant reset cycles,” she says. “Strategies actually make it into the market. Teams do not waste hours redoing work. The ROI rises because the organization stops hemorrhaging energy.”
One company she advised went from weekly reprioritizing to consistent quarterly execution rhythms. Another discovered that their top strategic decision had been based on a single outdated data source. After recalibrating with Decision Forensics™, the team replaced months of confusion with a clear path to market.
Why Leaders Resist
The resistance is rarely technical. It is human.
“Pride is a factor,” McCorkle says carefully. “No one wants to be told their decision making is flawed.” Leaders may not realize how much they rely on personal experience bias, or how often they interpret a report through the lens of a previous job.
Her approach is gentle but direct. “I encourage leaders to focus on getting it right, not being right,” she says. “Once they open that door, everything begins to shift.”
What Corporate Culture Could Become
If Decision Forensics™ were adopted widely, McCorkle believes the shift would be profound.
Lower attrition. Higher engagement. Less chaos. More trust.
“Employees are desperate for steady leadership,” she says. “When organizations stop reprioritizing every week, people feel grounded again. They take the work seriously. They deliver better products. Customer experience improves. It becomes a virtuous cycle.”
The Future of Decision Intelligence
McCorkle sees a world where decision intelligence becomes the next major competency inside corporate leadership. Not more tools or more dashboards, but a disciplined way of thinking.
“The shiny new AI tool will not save the business,” she says. “Only defensible decisions will.”
And in a corporate era shaped by disruption, volatility, and the increasing blur between machine output and human judgment, defensible decisions may be the most important strategic advantage of all.
If your organization is ready to replace instinct-driven decisions with a structured, evidence-backed approach, you can explore Jen McCorkle’s Decision Forensics™ framework and begin building true decision intelligence at https://www.thedecisionadvantage.com/.
