Should we rely on our gut feel or should we stick to facts and figures?
Many psychometric questionnaires, used for the purposes of personality profiling, seek to identify whether you are analytical or someone who goes with their gut feel / intuition. Gut feel can seem to some as a rather flimsy way of making decisions. Certainly if you were at work and said that you made a business decision just because it felt right, you’d be lucky not to be laughed out of the meeting room at best. In many workplaces most decisions are expected to be backed up by facts and figures or at least be ‘how we’ve always done it around here’.
Intuition: That Lightbulb Moment
To many intuition is something spiritual, a knowledge within the soul from some mystical source or a previous life, a magical sixth sense. This is a concept that does not sit well with me personally as it implies that there are a gifted or chosen few and our limits are pre-determined.
To the scientific and psychology world, intuition is a manifestation of our experience in life. It is said that our conscious minds can only process 40 bits of information per second and the unconscious mind can process 20,000,000 – so that’s 500,000 times faster! Intuition is our way of accessing this vast information source. This is why it expresses itself as a gut feel as opposed to a strong rational reasoning because our conscious minds cannot keep up.
Intuition is learnt
As we grow from child to adult, we learn many things that become part of our intuitive responses. If you imagine walking down your street on your way home and an elderly, well dressed gentlemen, who you have never met before approaches you offering you a sweet asking you to go back to his place; would you go? Most of us would find it strange that someone we do not know would extend such an offer, no matter how nice they look or well dressed they are. This would not be a conscious thought process, we would just intuitively feel uncomfortable and no doubt reject the offer. A child may not have learnt the same intuitions, especially if, for example, the gentleman offering the sweet looked just like their grandfather.
Through years of experience, being socialized to the norms of society either by stories from our parents, teachers, the media (fairytales, news stories etc) we have been passed messages, experiences or given imagery that we internalize. These messages / experience / imageries then manifest themselves in a common sense / gut feeling emotional response when we react to situations. This intuitive learning continues in the workplace and life in general.
Gary Klein is a scientific researcher who has been hired by the fire brigade, marines and commercial companies to look at how people make decisions in times of high pressure or crisis, so that the decision-making process can be replicated.
Fight Fire With... Intuition
One of my favourite examples of Klein’s research is when he was working with the fire brigade. A lietenant took his team into a burning house. The fire was in the kitchen and the crew attempted to put it out – but found that it just kept burning as strong as ever no matter how much water they put on it. The lieutenant started to feel uneasy and despite there being nothing unusual about the building or any rational analysis to base his decision upon, he pulled his crew out of the house. Soon after they left the building, the floor where they were standing collapsed, had they still been there they would have plunged into the fire below.
Klein and his team interviewed the lieutenant and his crew. His crew believed their lieutenant to have some magical sixth sense and the lieutenant believed this himself. When first asked, he could give no rational explanation for why he withdrew his crew. With deeper questioning he was able to give a better explanation. For a fire that looked so small it emaneated a great deal of heat. Despite there being a great deal of heat, there was little noise – fire makes a lot of noise. None of the efforts of his crew even put a dent in the fire. None of these fit with the pattern of a small fire in one room of a small family home – which is what his rational concious mind could see. All of this violated his subconcious expectations of such a fire in his years of experience as a fireman and his gut told him to remove his crew.
Does this mean we should ignore facts and figures completely?
No, it should not be a case of either / or. Analysis has its place and should be coupled with intuition. In the case of the fire, the lieutenant did not have the time to process all the options as to why the normal pattern had been violated, eventually working out there was a larger fire in the basement – by going on his experienced gut feel he saved his crew. However, the likes of you and I are rarely in those life and death situations and may have to rationally explain our recommendations.
Hogarth , a behavioural psychologist and author, refers to the analysis process as the ‘deliberate system’. This is the main route taken by less experienced individuals i.e. interns / graduates, who have less experience to rely on and therefore will have to take more of an analytical route.
We live in the information age. You can get up in the morning, listen to the radio whilst you get ready for work, read a paper on the way to work, arrive at your desk where the telephone rings, emails and live chat tools flash up, your iphone starts to vibrate etc. There is a Tsunami of information that we can use to make work decisions, book holidays or even choose which films we’d like to see. The idea of coupling intuition with analysis is to avoid being paralysed by overwhelming amounts of data. Using your intuition to identify where / who the best sources of information are then use analysis to evaluate and test this information.
The danger with intuition is that we don’t know what it is we don’t know! Although you may be highly experienced you will have blind spots, we are always able to learn more. So, using intuition alone means we are pulling only on the experience we have had and ignoring any other possibilities, as identified by Boone and Snowden who researched decision-making:
“It is the experts (rather than the leaders) who are prone to it [entrained thinking].. when the problem occurs, innovative suggestions by non-experts may be overlooked or dismissed, resulting in lost opportunities…the experts have, after all, invested in building their knowledge and they are unlikely to tolerate controversial ideas.”
Hogarth points out:
“Expertise in one domain does not guarantee it in another”
For this reason, analysis should not be ignored completely.
How can we grow better intuition?
Intuition Leading To Solutions
Arrange informal or formal mentoring. Expose yourself to someone who always appears to make the right kind of decisions and seek to understand the internal process they go through that makes them come up with the answers they do. You can seek a job or volunteer role somewhere where you will gain the right kind of experience and have an opportunity to test your intuitions safely. You can do a post-mortem of when you made a wrong decision, once you understand which sign you misinterpreted or which point you stopped looking for other possibilities, you will have a better chance of rectifying it.
How do you access your intuition?
Intuition sits in our subconscious. As we already know, this contains vast amounts of data. It’s your automatic pilot when you get up in the morning and turn the alarm off or turn off the iron or lock the door. Your subconscious controls a lot of things that have become routine for you and you no longer consciously think about.
Have you ever found that when you have stopped thinking about a problem an answer seems to pop up? Or something you were trying so hard to remember all of a sudden jumps into your head? Even sometimes overnight an answer will come to you. Sometimes we are too stressed or pressured to use the conscious rational hand to dip into our subconscious and dig out the information we require. At times taking a step back and relaxing, doing or thinking of something else helps. You can do this by finding a quiet place to relax, you can meditate, do yoga or even hypnotherapy.
This may be difficult in the middle of a meeting to just push the papers aside and climb on the desk to meditate – so maybe in such a situation you could clear your head of what you are thinking of for a minute and consciously relax, or ask for some time to come back with the answer at a later date.
Whatever you choose to do to access this information, hopefully you now will have a little more respect for your gut feel. Although it is not 100% infallible, it is your subconscious’s way of sending you an sms!
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