March 16, 2010
Intuition is not the same as instinct and impulse (these last two are driven by our ‘animal’ brains, overwhelmed as they are by basic desires and fears). It is a talent that can - and must - be honed over time. Research into those with highly-developed domain expertise - such as fire-fighters and doctors - shows that their many past experiences
directly create the conditions for success in high-pressure situations where there is no time to deliberate and study the charts. Chess masters spend 10 years and 10,000 hours studying myriad patterns so that they can perform under pressure. Unless a leader has a means by which to hone their intuition with real-world experience and feedback - they will often fall back to the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses that organisms show when in danger. These fear-based responses do not work well in today’s networked organisations where creativity, collaboration and innovation are so key and where an organisation’s chances of survival are based on its ability to make great decisions in environments that are unfamiliar and where no one person or company can possibly have all the information necessary. The heuristics (i.e. rules of thumb) and checklists we advocate to our clients to aid collaborative innovation and distributed leadership can be extremely useful to support individuals making the right decisions in the increasingly regular situations where hierarchy and line management fails, and helps them guard against both group-think and their own cognitive biases (like the tendency to prioritise the first piece of information or smaller short-term gains over larger long-term ones).
