RE:RE:i have a Gut feeling Why did the stomach go to the party?
Because it had a “gut feeling” that there would be “food for thought” and it didn’t want to miss out on any “belly laughs”!
The trust in intuition is understandable. People have always sought to put their faith in mystical forces when confronted with earthly confusion. But it’s also dangerous. Intuition has its place in decision making—you should not ignore your instincts any more than you should ignore your conscience—but anyone who thinks that intuition is a substitute for reason is indulging in a risky delusion. Detached from rigorous analysis, intuition is a fickle and undependable guide—it is as likely to lead to disaster as to success. And while some have argued that intuition becomes more valuable in highly complex and changeable environments, the opposite is actually true. The more options you have to evaluate, the more data you have to weigh, and the more unprecedented the challenges you face, the less you should rely on instinct and the more on reason and analysis.
The most dangerous of these flaws, when it comes to intuition, is our deep-seated need to see patterns. The mind’s well-documented facility for pattern recognition seems to lie at the very core of intuition—it’s how the brain synthesizes information from the past and uses it to understand the present and anticipate the future. But it can get us into trouble. Researchers have shown that our unconscious desire to identify patterns is so strong that we routinely perceive them where they don’t in fact exist. When confronted with a new phenomenon, our brains try to categorize it based on our previous experiences, to fit it into one of the patterns stored in our memories. The problem is that, in making that fit, we inevitably filter out the very things that make the new phenomenon new—we rush to recycle the reactions and solutions from the past.
That instinct, seemingly hardwired into our thinking by evolution, is extremely useful in life-or-death situations where fine distinctions are irrelevant. If you were a caveman and had seen strange animals maul other cavemen in the past, then it would probably be wise for you to flee from any strange animal you happened to come across—even if you’d never seen the beast before. The benefit of a careful analysis of the situation would be far outweighed by the risk of inaction. But managers are not cavemen. In complex business situations, fine distinctions do matter—often, they’re precisely what separates success from failure. If you try to interpret a competitive threat or market upheaval by simply squeezing it into an old pattern, you’re likely to miss what makes it different—and take the wrong action. Intuition is a means not of assessing complexity but of ignoring it. That’s valuable if you’re a firefighter in a burning building or a soldier on a battlefield. It’s not valuable if you’re an executive faced with a pressing decision about investing millions in a new product for a rapidly changing market.
Author: Eric Bonabeau - has 10 years of AI R&D experience and 20 years in managing tech-based professional services, specializing in AI, strategy, sales, and business development.