Intuition in decision making
Decision making involves an intimate combination of analysis and intuition. As former SAS airlines CEO Jan Carlson effectively puts it, “… In real life you find that even after you gather all the relevant information, there is still a gap, a part that you cannot neatly calculate. And that’s where you have to add your intuition, to make your final decision and go ahead.” La formazione tradizionale è molto esaustiva per quanto riguarda i metodi analitici, ma quando si arriva alla parte intuitiva, è un po’ come tirare una moneta. Dunque, se il decision making è una catena di analisi/intuizione e la forza di una catena è data dal suo anello più debole, what if you could learn come rafforzare l’intuizione per rafforzare l’intero processo decisionale? Sensing® method teaches you to deliberately access the information of the intuitive mind and combine it with logic to make better decisions.
In 1978 U.S. economist Herbert Simon received the Nobel Memorial Award for his research on the “decision making process” in business. Simon’s discovery was “bounded rationality”. Simon postulated that decisions people make are not rational, as claimed by classical and neoclassical schools of management. Often, decisions have to be made under time and information constraints, with a lack of knowledge of the consequences of one’s actions and using an information processing system (the human brain) with limited processing capacity. The way to bridge this asymmetry and incompleteness of information is to resort to intuition. According to Simon, good management does ‘not have the luxury of choosing between “analytic” and “intuitive” approaches to problems.’ Good management—indeed the ‘art’ of management—involves an ‘intimate combination’ of intuitive sensing and analytical solving 1.
Intuition is memory
For Simon intuition is not magic, but memory: “The situation has provided a cue: this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”2 The mind is a huge database that records and stores all the events we have experienced in the course of our lives. Everything, even what we have caught unconsciously with the corner of our eye. When we have to make a decision or solve a problem, our mind cross-checks all the data we have acquired about the problem with the data stored in our brain to come up with the optimal answer. In other words, intuition is deeply rooted in memory. This is why Simon argues that intuition is ‘recognition’.
According to Simon, good management does “not have the luxury of choosing between ‘analytic’ and ‘intuitive’ approaches to problems.” Good management—indeed the ‘art’ of management—involves an ‘intimate combination’ of intuitive sensing and analytical solving.
Sensing: direct access to the intuitive mind
Intuition is great, the only problem is that it occurs at random, in other words it happens of its own accord, not necessarily when it is needed. But what would it be like if you could come up with intuitions on a particular topic at will? Sensing® is the technique that allows you to access the information of the intuitive mind when you need to.
Sensing® is based on the assumption that intuitions reach the conscious mind in the form of sensations. If sensations are the channel of intuition, we can then move up that channel to access the information from the intuitive mind. With Sensing, when faced with a problem to solve, all you need to ask yourself is: “What do I sense about this problem? And bam!… you can go directly to the heart of the problem.
What can you obtain by Sensing? Sensing will take you to the heart of the problem. When you have an intuition, the solution to a problem will reveal itself in its essence with crystal clarity. In the same way, when you have a problem to solve, you can practice Sensing and quickly get to comprehend its essential truth, what it actually takes to solve it.
You already know
Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman tells an illuminating story that helps to better understand what we are talking about. 3
“A good friend, a physician, was once offered a business proposition: If he would leave his practice to become medical director of a fledgling condominium health resort and invest $100,000 of his own capital in the venture, his projected share of the business would amount to $4 million within three years. Or so the business plan promised. My friend liked the vision of a resort where people could improve their health as they vacationed; coupled with the lure of a possibly fantastic payoff, he couldn’t resist. He sold his medical practice, invested in the resort, and became its medical director. But during that start-up year he found that there was no medical program to direct yet—he ended up spending his days essentially as a salesman, trying to interest people in buying time-share condos at the resort. One day, as he was driving to work at his new job, he found himself—to his astonishment—pounding the dashboard of his car and yelling, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” Pulling over, my friend took a few moments to get a grip on his tumultuous feelings, calmed down, and drove on to work. A year later the resort was bankrupt—and so was he. He admits now that he had a gut feeling from the outset that there was something wrong with the proposition, that the projections in the business plan were too rosy, and that the scheme was really about real estate development, not preventive medicine. But at the time he had been craving a change. And the financial incentives looked so promising that he buried his misgivings—much to his later regret.”
- First, he would have paid more attention to his sensations. He would have known that sensations are not imaginary but always carry information. He would also have known that this type of information can either be intuitive or emotional. As the Latin adage goes, tertium non datur, there is no third option.
- He would have therefore been able to tell genuine intuitions from emotions and impulsive desires, discard the latter and decipher the meaning of the former. The Sensing technique would have allowed the doctor to obtain this information right from the outset, avoiding the smokescreen of overthinking.
- Last but not least, if this wasn’t enough, he would have been alerted by the nagging sensation that something wasn’t adding up. Sensing shows that what on the surface can appear as a doubt, is actually a symptom that the analytical mind and the intuitive mind are in conflict. One of the better universally known rules of thumb 4 is: “If in doubt, don’t”, or “If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no”.
With Sensing you learn to generate intuitions at will on a problem at hand. When you have a problem you practice Sensing and Bam!... you get to the core of the issue.
If the doctor had this information, he could have put it to the test: for example, he could have better investigated the healthcare plan, or asked for expert help to assess how realistic the financial projections were. In short, he would have had a direction to follow to further his research. As we say in our training programs, intuition should never be used blindly, but as an indication of where to investigate.
Conclusion
As shown by Simon and confirmed by Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio 5, the idea that decisions can be made by using only the analytical mind is an illusion. As former SAS airlines CEO Jan Carlson effectively puts it, “… In real life you find that even after you gather all the relevant information, there is still a gap, a part that you cannot neatly calculate. And that’s where you have to add your intuition, to make your final decision and go ahead.”
The decision-making process is like a chain whose links consist of analysis and intuition. Analytical methods can help, but do not exhaust the question. Knowing how to use intuition, in the way we have seen, can lead to huge improvements in the quality of decisions. Today this can be achieved through Sensing. Sensing offers an easy, quick and effective way to improve our confidence in the mechanisms of intuition, and so increase the probability of making better decisions.
1. Sadler-Smith, Eugene. Intuition in Business (p.37). OUP Oxford, 2023. Kindle Ed.
2. Simon, H. A. What is an explanation of behavior? Psychological Science, 2, 150 – 161 (1997)
3. Goleman, Daniel. Working With Emotional Intelligence (pp.49-50). Random House Publishing Group.
4. The terms “Rule of Thumb” or “heuristic” define a rule that although not scientifically proven, yet with time and practice has been proven to work.
5. H Damasio 1, T Grabowski, R Frank, A M Galaburda, A R Damasio, “The return of Phineas Gage: clues about the brain from the skull of a famous patient.” Science. 1994 May 20;264(5162)
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