Intuition.
A few years ago, I was subcontracting on a project for which I had to assess a number of partners at a major consulting firm. When I submitted my write up on one of them, the head of the project called me to task for including an a line about the person’s “intuitive” decision making style.
He said I’d have to take that out because intuition is not observable (it is inferred), and therefore has no place in a report.
I said that intuition could indeed be observed, just not measured. Yet. I also argued that an inability to measure intuition didn’t make it less important as a tool. That would be like arguing that blueberries didn’t become good for people until we learned to measure antioxidants. I didn’t buy it.
I still don’t.
What do you think?
I see different people using the word intuition to mean different things. For instance, the term “intuition” might be used to mean:
- A deep seated Knowing (capital K) that comes from nowhere and is never wrong. We all know this feeling: the phone will ring; the golf ball will go in the hole; she will say yes to my question. This feeling is the source of will power and charisma. (Show me a start up company with a pretty prospectus, and I’ll show you an entrepreneur behind it who Knows how the story ends.) We know when we’re in the presence of it, but we haven’t a clue what it actually is.
- A predictive ability born from a mental database of past experiences and relevant information. “I’ve seen it a million times.” This is what most businesspeople seem to focus on when they talk about intuition. This intuition isn’t working too well for people these days; too much change.
- A predictive ability born from a creative application of knowledge. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this form of intuition in his book, Blink. The brain is a bit of a black box, and inside that box, connections are constantly being made. Connections that let us translate what we know about VCRs into assumptions about how camcorders probably work. That sort of thing.
Personally, I think intuition plays a much bigger role in our decisions than we care to admit; I go so far as to claim that “people are rationalized, not rational.”
But that’s just me. Do you believe in intuition? Do you use it?
How good is your gut?
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Jason, I agree that intuition is a definite asset though you can’t measure it. I have always felt I had good intuition when it came to interviewing candidates for companies. I was not a subject matter expert in such areas as accounting, engineering skills, etc., but felt very comfortable in my ability to feel if a person would be a good fit into our culture, team environment etc.
“People are rationalized, not rational.” Wow, so true! I have used my intuition all my life and it hasn’t let me down often. Because I chose to never analyze it, not to break the spell (?) I learned to rationalize it a lot. It helps to convince others, and maybe it reassures me in the process.
For years I doubted my intuition at work because my gut was not lining up with what was happening at my job. Eventually, I realized that my gut was right and my job was what was wrong. When I started trusting my intuition again (after leaving that awful job), things took off for me.
There are a lot of people in leadership position who try to get you to ignore your instincts. That’s probably why the client you refer to needed to hire you.
In Jonah Lehrer’s, “How We Decide”, he explains the physiological process for descision making and how it’s the fault of our feeble prefrontal cortex that some descisions are difficult. I think it’s a good manager’s intuition that prevents “paralysis by analysis”–which can be measured as a function of the time from proposal to action.
I’ll second Justin’s reference to “How We Decide”. It is an accessible book that describes well how the various centers in our brain interact and “argue” while we try to decide, including what we often refer to as “intuition.” What I like and what applies to this post, is that it also summarizes what I think is a good overall strategy for thinking and deciding that uses the advantages of each aspects of our thinking, including intuition. The upshot is that as you said, intuition often is rooted in the accumulation of lots and lots of experiences. Later on, that accumulation arises as some kind of “feeling” about the current situation. When it is “correct”, it often beats logical processes hands down; it’s like the world’s best neural net + pattern matcher. But like you said, it can have tremendous weak spots. What if the experiences you’ve had have been a distortion (think prejudices)? What if conditions just aren’t the same anymore (think financial crises)? So what Lehrer basically says is stop and think about *why* you might have this intuition about something and does the current situation warrant “following your gut.” Depending on the stakes and other factors, it may be wiser to note the feeling, but choose a path of further data gathering and hypothesis testing (if you are blessed with the time). If you don’t have the time (think pilot + plane emergency), then that’s the time the “system” (and every passenger on board) will be hoping that thousands and thousands of hours of simulations that took the pilot through various “what if” scenarios will pay off. A great book.
@John—Interestingly, interviewing is one of those times when I recommend that people don’t use intuition… IMO, it’s too difficult to disassociate “I like this person” from “I find this person competent” without a structured, analytical process.
@GenXpert—Live your story, baby. Live your story…
@Justin—you might also like Deep Survival by Gonsales.
@Mark—Another great book on the subject is Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart. It’s a powerful, albeit dry, look at how we make decisions with imperfect information. Turns out, the human brain uses a series of predictable short cuts to get around a lack of info.
@Nathalie—I agree, when you’re on a roll, don’t break the spell! That may sound superstitious to some, but I think everyone can relate to being at an event and having someone walk up to a table and shattering the vibe with a comment that doesn’t “fit.” We may not be able to measure this stuff, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there!