Disconfirm. Rather than finding clues that corroborate your hunch-all too easy in an information rich world-start by asking yourself how you could know you were, in fact, wrong. What evidence would contradict your belief ad how likely is it that you would see it? One technique is to use this thought experiment: Imagine that you are already in the future and things have not turned out as you had hoped. Now use your new hindsight to ask how this might have happened.
If you do go the route of using big data, refrain from revealing your hopes and dreams to the data scientists you hire to collect and mine information. Ask question in way that prompts them to look for caveats that would endanger your mission but that doesn't reveal what you actually hope they’ll find.