Who has trusted their intuition or gut instinct when making a major decision?
How did that work out for you? Anyone care to briefly comment?
What is intuition?
A concise description is difficult, but this is a good definition:
“Intuition is an ongoing process which the user is unaware of. This process combines experience with knowledge whose origin cannot be ascertained.
However, this knowledge can be adduced for decisions even if it has never been a subject of discussion.” This is why, intuition unifies not only experience but also assumptions of evolution” Munich Business School.
Or this one:
Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group, called intuition “The subconscious integration of all the experiences, conditioning, and knowledge of a lifetime, including the cultural and emotional biases of that lifetime.”
Everyone acts intuitively every day, it’s important to discover this intuition and use it wisely.
What place does data have?
These days we have a mountain of data available to us. That data should surely be all we need to make good decisions, right?
In reality it can guide us to have options to choose from but often there is too much data, it can come too fast or too slow to be useful and we have to make quick decisions based on instinct without all the facts.
In fact, the more you are a successful leader the more you will use gut instinct in using differing, sometimes inadequate facts to make a decision.
The risks of intuition
1. We naturally give more weight to information that confirms our assumptions and prejudices, for example, while dismissing information that would call them into question.
2. We’re also creatures of the status quo, drawn to conclusions that justify and perpetuate current conditions and repelled by anything that would roil the waters.
3. We’re irrationally influenced by the first information we receive on a particular subject—it becomes, as decision researchers put it, the “anchor” that determines and distorts how we process all subsequent data.
4. The most dangerous of these flaws, when it comes to intuition, is our deep-seated need to see patterns. But it can get us into trouble. Researchers have shown that our unconscious desire to identify patterns is so strong that we routinely perceive them where they don’t in fact exist.
Summary
Intuition is an important part of most decisions but be aware of the pitfalls of using your intuition and you will use it to even better effect.
