The Human Factor Podcast Episode 33: Turning Instinct into Insight with Sascha Härtel

In all walks of life, and one of the great natural feelings of being a human being is that gut instinct for something. That feeling about something, a feeling in the stomach, a nagging doubt or a natural intuition. It’s fair to say we will have all experienced it at some point in our life. In the world of business or sport or any industry where decisions made purely on instinct can be extremely costly, turning instinct into hard fact is an absolute imperative. In the world of work, this is where reporting and analytics support the process in a very big way and this is where the importance of raw data surfaces its head again. Data pulled from multiple sources can be examined to support or reject hypotheses (those gut feelings). In the world of sport, analytics has become more and more integral to successful performance across a multitude of processes and disciplines – providing insights into individual and team performance both on and off the field of play. For example – it is used to determine tactics to win a match, it is used to monitor and prevent injuries to players, it is used to assist decisions made on buying or selling players where huge sums of money are spent on talent. To support this, more and more data is captured and analysed than ever before. How then can technology sift through all this data and provide insights that will lead to the promised land of successful performance outcomes. For this episode we will be diving back into the world of football and are super excited to be joined by someone who is leveraging analytics in a VERY big way to support the organisation and performance of his club TSG Hoffenheim in the German Bundesliga – the highest football league in Germany.