Life Conversations: Trusting Your Gut

Careful beleiving your gut, just because everyone says, you should - Ashish

We are told always, “trust your gut.” However, smart decision makers know it can’t be that simple. Surely there are times when intuition guides us accurately, and other times when it leads us astray. How do we to tell the difference?

When we first detect a familiar situation, we often need more information to figure out what it all means. Intuition makes our job easier by providing us, in the midst of a million different stimuli we could focus on, the relevant cues — particular features that we ought to pay close attention to. Next, given the situation, intuition informs us of plausible goals we might want to have. Finally, intuition suggests actions to us.

But where does intuition come from?

Intuition comes from patterns we’ve identified in our past experiences. From the time we are born, we constantly seek out patterns in our environment. We see 2+2 consistently paired with the number 4. We notice that parents are angry when we ‘get the look.’ These patterns, once identified, get stored away in our long-term memory.

The next time we detect one of these patterns (or something similar), our brain recollects and delivers the corresponding data to us. But can we trust it?

Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, two leading scholars on intuition who wrote the definitive paper on the topic, titled "Conditions for Intuitive Expertise," agree that the answer isn’t contained in the intuitions themselves. Intuitions come with what Kahneman calls the illusion of validity: a subjective sense, often misleading and dangerous, of truth.

Instead, in order to assess the reliability of an intuition, we must evaluate the person who is experiencing the intuition and the environment in which that person operates. We can do this by asking How Much Quality Practice Have You Had?

In order to trust our intuition, we need to have had enough practice. Our intuitions are only as good as the database of patterns that we

draw them from. So, we need to have had sufficient experience noticing and revising patterns in order to have built up a database that is both robust and refined. But while the quantity of practice is important for developing reliable intuitions, just as important is the quality. The highest quality form of practice, the one that most reliably leads to accurate intuitions, is known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice isn’t just rote repetition — it involves constant adjustment based on feedback.

This process of analyzing the domains in which we can trust our intuitions and those we can’t is difficult, but a key part of being an effective decision maker is understanding our own personal boundaries of expertise. That is what makes an effective leader who can react quickly, correctly, and adeptly under stress. Great transformation leaders have that expertise where their data set of having led multiple transformations allows them to react better.

#Change #Gut #Transformation #Leadership