That’s how a majority of us work. I spend a LOT of time doing analytics and statistics, and writing programs to do some pretty nifty calculations that ultimately lead to key business decisions. Having data is an absolute necessity. Without it, people make their own assumptions as to what the underlying issues/data are and build their arguments for/against based on that.
That definitely leads to confusion as no one truly knows what they are talking about. They have an idea in their head that the data they received was what lead to their stance on the subject, but fail to remember, they never had data to begin with!