This is a big issue for all leaders.
The two gurus in this area Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein recently published a joint article in The American Psychologist titled “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise“. They come from oposing schools of thought – Klein from the naturalistic school who believe that experts often know more than they can say and Kahneman from the heuristics and biases school who believe that simple statistical models are usually more reliable than experts because the human suffers from biases. This makes the article particularly interesting – because they agree!
They agree that you can trust your gut when
- the environment is regular (i.e. the past is a good guide to the future – eg chess) – regularity test
- the environment provides clear cues about its current state (i.e. you can read the board) – validity test
- you have had enough experience of reacting to these cues and getting feedback from your reactions that your intuitive judgment is sound – sufficient feedback test.
They point out that these conditions are often not met in professional environments such as consulting and doctoring, which explains why these professions are so often wrong and why simple models often do better. The implication for strategy making is worrying – strategic challenges nearly always fail all three tests.
What the authors do not do is explain that we are largely unable to ignore our gut instincts. So, if we are in a situation that fails the tests, we need to build safeguards against our own foolishness. They also overlook other factors that we need to consider such as “inappropriate self-interest” and “attachments”, both of which can skew our intuitive judgments.
Conclusion: We need to be very aware when we are in situations where our gut instincts may let us down. In these circumstances, we should be humble (rather than lead from the front) and we should build robust decision processes to help us.
Interesting stuff. I wonder if it is possible to self-diagnose the problem or if this argues for some sort of mentor, coach or challenger to make sure that we are not fooling ourselves about the need for safeguards?
The authors seem to be suggesting that you can only ‘trust your gut’ when you can ‘trust the environment’ – that the cause and effect relationships of the past will continue unabated and in a linea fashion, into the future. So, ‘intuitive expertise’ may be helpful in gaining insight into current conditions but but does it help us develop foresight?
James has raised the issue of foresight. We often think of intuition as akin to foresight because our gut tells us that something is about to happen and then it does. But, now that we understand how our gut works – it is stimulated by the emotional tags associated with memories and previous judgments – we realise that it works best when the future is similar to the past experiences and decision situations we have been in. So, unless your past has given you experiences that are likely to make you intuitively wise in the circumstances that are coming up – your gut will not provide you with foresight.
Foresight must then come from trend analysis and for scenario building and from talking to people who do have relevant past experience. In fact foresight of this kind is often counter-intuitive – it goes against our gut – and, as a result can be hard to take on board.
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