On our ‘Engaging People, Powering Companies’ podcast last week,

Amrit spoke on the topic of intuition. I love this topic as it really helps us get behind what it is to be human. What we refer to as a ‘gut feel’. In a world where data is king, and everyone and everything seems to be looking for an algorithm to make decisions for us, this seems to be a contentious topic.

This makes me think of Rory Sutherland speaking at ‘Nudgefest’ back in July this year, where he suggested that we don’t want open ended questions and subjectivity, we want to win arguments. We don’t want to be responsible for making decisions, we pretend that things have a one right answer rather than incorporating human judgement, and instead pretend problems are like a high school maths equation, where there is only one right answer. If things go wrong, we haven’t made a mistake, we simply followed the data. This approach keeps us from having to own the consequences of any bad decisions, but also misses out on that very rich other data set, our lived wisdom.

Amrit described an example from years ago where he and three others needed to recruit for a position. He was so conscious of recruiting fairly, and free from bias across all four interviewers, that he devised a robust set of questions and scoring mechanism, that they all agreed to follow. One candidate came out head and shoulders above the rest in the scoring, and true to his word and the process, to keep it fair and make ‘the right’ decision, he recruited the person with the highest score. However, the score failed to consider the thing I am going to call ‘vibe’ that they got, about another candidate being absolutely the right fit for the position.

While discussing logically and rationally the scores, Amrit (and others) gut feel was screaming to say this is the wrong decision and that another candidate would be a better fit, but the scoring made it impossible to go against. It would have seemed ludicrous. Within six months the reality of the decision came to light painfully, and they had lost the candidate that would have been brilliant, and whom Amrit believes would still be working with us today!  This of course wasted time, effort and energy, and as such, has stayed with Amrit because despite the lengths he had gone to to make sure it was fair, he had prevented that human element when in the presence of another, no scoring system can capture or make sense of. Such is the power of instinct and intuition.

So, what is intuition?  According to Joel Pearson, a neuroscientist, psychologist, and author of ‘The Intuition Toolkit’, it is a form of knowledge that appears in our consciousness without any obvious thoughts, or logical, rational processing of information. Pearson gives it the definition of ‘the learned, positive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions’ and calls it the science of ‘psychophysics’. It is all happening unconsciously, and quickly, and is our brains take on a situation, based on prior learning.

It is all the past experiences and situations we’ve been in, lessons we’ve had, things we have watched, the culmination of our life’s knowledge, that our brain is processing in the moment, giving us information to say, here is what I think based on everything we have been through and experienced, helping us to make the right decision, based on the wisdom we hold inside our being.

Having studied this topic for 25 years, Pearson says that intuition is made up of three components; they are that it is learned, productive, and is based on unconscious information. What we have learnt is what dictates what we do with the unconscious information we receive; it needs to be productive, i.e. helpful and working for the better in our lives, and thirdly and the really interesting bit, the unconscious information. This is where we can be laser focused on one thing happening, like a spotlight on something, yet still be able to process a mass of unconscious information to help us process what our action/decision will be, which Pearson calls ‘blindaction’. This is where we use information, we are not conscious of, in our actions.  We have a library of wisdom that just is there in the background, working to help us, all the time.

Another Neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, theorised that we evolved to use bodily cues such as muscle tone, heart rate, and endocrine activity in order to make rapid decisions about how to navigate the physical and social worlds. These “somatic markers” translate unconscious emotions and sensations into a felt instinct. He states it is an evolutionary strategy that allows us to make quick decisions that require minimal thought, to enhance survival. In the modern world, these instincts can be interwoven with rational thought to improve decision-making. And if you like, data!

Let’s know and trust that intuition is rooted in science, and that gut feelings are the result of wisdom that we hold within, through many channels of information processing, which provide us a sort of road map, that integrates our emotions and physical sensations within any given environment. Maybe then we would trust ourselves more to own those gut feelings or our intuition – whatever you want to call it (!), and start really nurturing our own centeredness and self-awareness, so we can tap into it more easily, honing a skill that quite literally has been keeping us alive! If it is good enough for saving lives, it is good enough for the workplace! 

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