Many people believe that success can be “calculated” in advance and that dry, precise numbers alone should be enough to achieve a goal. However, this is usually far from the truth, as human intuition and observation still play a significant role in decision-making. It would be best to say that success is born at the intersection of these two vastly different components.

A striking example of this is the story of the Houston Astros, a baseball team that began its professional career as one of the worst out there. But after radically changing its approach to development, they became World Series champions half a century later. The changes began with the arrival of new general manager Jeff Luhnow. Together with his colleague, Sig Mejdal, Director of Decision Science, he developed a new system.

The essence of it is that cold, hard calculations don’t work without taking context and intuition into account. Every game and situation is unique, so the experience of a dozen previous games can only help identify trends, not predict a win. At the same time, human intuition is just as prone to error. Therefore, the issue isn’t whether to choose a person or a machine, but that it must be “man plus machine,” as long as the person remains in charge.

To achieve this, experts were brought in, including a former NASA scientist, who established a specialized analytical center. There, the subjective observations of live scouts were transformed into mathematical models, filtering out personal biases and retaining only what truly helps predict a player’s success. The goal was to combine fragmented knowledge into a single system. This allows one to see the full picture and make much more accurate decisions than either the human brain or a computer could on its own.