Can Instinct Beat Analytical Thinking?

What about the role of intuition and gut feelings in risk analysis and business decisions? Clearly, in business, that’s a big issue. This is an excerpt from a June 20, 2014 HBR Blog post.

Gut feelings are tools for an uncertain world. They’re not caprice. They are not a sixth sense or God’s voice. They are based on lots of experience, an unconscious form of intelligence.

Gerd Gigerenzer has worked with large companies and asked decision makers how often they base an important professional decision on that gut feeling. In the companies he’s worked with, which are large international companies, about 50% of all decisions are at the end a gut decision.

The Slade Group’s experience and wisdom can be an element in your competitive advantage.

But the same leaders and managers would never admit this in public. There’s fear of being made responsible if something goes wrong, so they have developed a few strategies to deal with this fear. One is to find reasons after the fact. A top manager may have a gut feeling, but then he asks an employee to find facts the next two weeks, and thereafter the decision is presented as a fact-based, big-data-based decision.

That’s a waste of time, intelligence, and money. The more expensive version is to hire a consulting company, which will provide a 200-page document to justify the gut feeling. And then there is the most expensive version, namely defensive decision making. Here, a manager feels he should go with option A, but if something goes wrong, he can’t explain it, so that’s not good. So he recommends option B, something of a secondary or third-class choice.

Defensive decision-making hurts the company and protects the decision maker. In the studies I’ve done with large companies, it happens in about a third to half of all important decisions. You can imagine how much these companies lose.

We can also show you the “how” to make the “what” work for you!

Or, recognize the value of experience on your marketing team. Buy into using your instinct or intuition to find and engage an experienced leader and his team based upon a match of your needs and his capabilities. Then have a conversation that can lead to a profoundly wise decision in an uncertain business landscape.

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