As a busy manager, you often need to make decisions on the fly. Therefore, it can be scary to realise that your performance in your role is largely based on all those impromptu decisions. Thankfully, research[1. See for example: Kharti, N. & Ng, H. (2000), ‘The Role of Intuition In Strategic Decision Making’, Human Relations, 57-86; Burke, L. & Miller, M. (1999), ‘Taking the Mystery Out of Intuitive Decision Making’, Academy of Management Executive, Nov, 91-99; Behling, O. & Eckel, N. (1991), ‘Making Sense Out of Intuition’, Academy of Management Executive, Feb, 46-47; Agor, W. (1989), Intuition in Organizations, Sage.] shows that honing your intuition can enable you to make better and faster decisions. This article shows you how.
The first thing to understand is that intuitive decision making is not anti-logical. Rather, intuition and logic work in much the same way as your left and right hand.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
—Albert Einstein
Each can operate independently of each other, but even more can be achieved when you use them together. Here are three ways to do just that:
- Draw on your distilled experience
- Heed the wisdom of your feelings
- Conduct an analogical analysis
Draw On Your Distilled Experience
A great deal of intuitive insight comes from the experience you have amassed in similar situations throughout your life and career. Consider, for example, an experiment involving both novice and master chess players[2. Simon, H. (1987), ‘Making Management Decisions: The Role of Intuition & Emotion’, Academy of Management Executive, Feb, 59-60]. In the first part of the experiment, participants were shown a chess board as it stood in the middle of a real game with about 25 pieces on the board. After about ten seconds, the pieces were removed and participants were asked to reconstruct the board, placing each piece in its correct place. On average, the master chess players were able to place about 23 pieces back in their correct spots, while novices could only correctly place an average of six pieces. In the second part of the experiment, the exercise was repeated, but this time the participants were shown a board on which the pieces had been placed at random. Because the masters could not intuitively relate the placement of the pieces to their experience in real games, they scored no better than the novices. When you are able to subconsciously draw on a range of past experiences, you can intuitively come up with better ways to deal with the challenge at hand.
To tap into your distilled experience, try asking yourself these questions: What similar situations have I faced before? What did I do? What worked? What didn’t? Why was that? What lessons did that teach me? How can I apply those lessons to this situation?
Heed the Wisdom of Your Feelings
Feelings exist for a reason, and harnessed properly, they can enhance rather than impede your decisions. Emotions have been hard-wired into our psyche because they automatically prompt us to act in ways that help us to survive and thrive in the world[3. Plutchik, R. (1980), Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis, Pearson]. Generally speaking, we are motivated to move towards things that we believe will make us feel good and to avoid or change things which may make us feel bad[4. Davidson, R. (1992), ‘Emotion & Affective Style’, Psychological Science, 3, 39-43.]. However, it also useful to consider the unique wisdom that can be found in different negative emotions.
| When You Feel | Heed This Wisdom |
| Worried or Afraid | Take action now that will prevent or make it far less likely that what you fear will come to pass. |
| Angry or Annoyed | Check your facts, then (if still warranted), be assertive, stand up for yourself (or others) and take measured actions to address unfairness and injustice. |
| Sad | Grieve what you have lost (tangible or otherwise), talk about it and draw lessons from the experience that will make it less likely for you to experience similar losses in the future. |
| Disgusted | Move away from and avoid whatever it was that made you feel that way. |
| Surprised | Pay close attention to the events and activities around you, and consider how and why things are not the way you thought them to be. Revisit your beliefs and your assumptions, and let this new insight help you to create a more accurate mental picture of the realities before you. |
To tap into your emotional wisdom, simply ask yourself how you feel about the situation before you, identify the nugget of wisdom associated with that specific emotion, then think about appropriate and intelligent ways that you can incorporate this wisdom into your chosen response.
Conduct an Analogical Analysis
Analogical thinking helps you to make sense of an unfamiliar or ambiguous challenge by considering how it is similar to something that you are already familiar with. It is based on analogical reasoning, a way of thinking that psychologists consider as legitimate as deductive and inductive reasoning[4. See for example, Burton, L., Westen, D. & Kowalski, R. (2009), Psychology, 2nd edn., Wiley.]. Consider, for example, a young manager trying to determine what is required to secure a long and successful career in leadership. Sustained excellence in any human endeavour, including leadership, is somewhat akin to keeping a thoroughbred racehorse at the top of its game.
First of all, this particular analogy calls attention to the difference between short-term performance (such as winning a single race) and prolonged success. The next step is to consider what may be necessary to have a long and successful career as a leader by identifying what needs to be done to keep a racehorse in peak condition. Here are just a few thoughts that immediately spring to mind:
- As a racehorse is nourished with quality feed, so too must a leader nourish their own body and mind.
- To perform well as a leader, you need to practise regularly.
- To stay at your best, you need to also build in time for rest and renewal.
- Effective leadership is a combination of natural ability and conscious development.
- A coach can help you help you to stay at the top of your game.
Finally, you need to consciously acknowledge that while an analogy highlights useful insights from the similarities that you find, there is never a perfect one-to-one correspondence. You can build this into your analogical analysis by asking yourself how the challenge at hand is:
- Different from what you are comparing it to (e.g., how is achieving a successful career in leadership different than keeping a racehorse at the top of its game?)
- Similar to other things (e.g., how is achieving a successful career in leadership similar to the invention of the light bulb?)
Good luck with building these three intuitive approaches into your decision-making process.
