Intuition, the Key to Agility

You are facing a tough choice about which direction to go in a workplace problem. Management wants the results immediately (meaning that your work should have been done yesterday), yet you don’t nearly have all the information you need to make a comfortable decision. You will have to take a chance and guess—to use your intuition.

The idea of basing crucial judgments on intuition goes directly against the bulk of our training, which taught us that advances come step-by-step and project developments must be based on clear, solid information. In Henry Ford’s era, when car models were pretty much the same from year to year, that approach might have worked. But in today’s era of continuous improvement and greater competition, when a new model of doing business or a new product can barely reach the market before an improved version is breathing down its neck, many decisions must be made before all the necessary information becomes available.

Need I point out that money is always at stake in these situations? Other people are counting on you to make the right decision, and to make it quickly and efficiently. While gathering information obviously is still crucial, you will have to depend more on your intuition.

Intuition exploits your expertise and experience in making decisions. Unfortunately, intuition depends, to an unnerving degree, on guesswork—there’s always more information we wish we had.

With intuition, your "gut feeling," reasons you can’t easily articulate, but feel are correct, become the basis for making some decisions.

How often, at college or on the job, have you discussed intuition? Probably never. But more and more, success will bless individuals and organizations that recognize that intuition is an asset to be valued and refined. These winners know that decisions made after "all the facts are in" often are decisions made too late.

Intuition not only helps us become agile managers and workers, but also teaches us about ourselves. If our gut feelings are generally correct, we’ll rely on them more in the future. Likewise, we’ll increasingly value staffers with good intuitive powers.

If the culture of the organization frowns on acting without "solid" data, or if it accepts intuitive decisions only if they are made by the highest levels of management, then agility will be lost.

However valuable intuition may be, we really know very little about it. Still, you know when you use it. Pay attention to your intuitive experiences and you’ll find yourself depending more and more in your intuition. That’s a good way to get ahead.