#ThinkfullyHabit: Check it out
Should we trust our intuition or be guided by analysis? There’s an unspoken tug of war that often exists – maybe within yourself, amongst your colleagues or inside your organisation. Do you look for the evidence, trust the data and focus on the stats? Or do you go with your gut, follow your hunch and trust your instincts? The best answer is to stop the tug of war, drop the rope and make the best use of both. In complex, non life and death situations where we don’t have to make instant judgements, it's essential to pause long enough to check out our intuitions.
“It is through science that we prove but through intuition that we discover.”
WHY?
We can easily get into the habit of not using our full thinking and rely instead on one or two Thinking Strategies, when in fact we have four - two of which are more intuitive and two which are more analytical*. The two intuitive thinking strategies often (wrongly) get bundled together. For different reasons they both need checking out.
Expert thinking is fast experience-based thinking that often manifests as an intuitive gut feel or as an automatic response. It allows us to draw from all of our past experience to immediately make sense of a situation. It's brilliant for efficiency, for speed and for making valuable use of experience; however, it can get mixed up with assumption, guesswork and leave us at risk of tunnel vision.
Click thinking is also intuitive and happens when ideas that apparently seem unrelated just fall into place – in a click! It can feel like it happens out of the blue or as an ‘ah-ha! moment; often after a sustained period of mulling something over. It’s great for helping us get to new and creative ideas, but we don’t always know where ideas have come from and they can be hard to justify.
If we fail to acknowledge and test ideas that come about from either type of intuitive thinking we are at risk of ideas which are unscrutinised and prone to bias.
As the scientist Richard Dawkins acknowledges, science often makes intuitive leaps forward by starting with an idea of what might be true and then testing it out through experiment and observation. He warns that “intuition is very important, but it is important that scientists should not be so wedded to their intuition that they omit the very important testing phase.” The same should be true whether we are scientists or not.
A study by Malewska of the Poznán University of Economics and Business found that only a quarter of managers used a combination of analytical and intuitive approaches, while half used more analytical, and a fifth used more intuitive approaches**. It suggests it’s not inevitable that people will make use of both analytical and intuitive thinking in their work. It means that we should do three things i) TUNE-IN and raise our own awareness of when we are being driven by our intuitions ii) MAKE EXPLICIT when we are basing something on intuition and resist the urge to dress up it up as something else and iii) CHECK-OUT intuitions by testing them to make sure we are not being misguided by emotion, acting on assumption or simply falling foul of lazy thinking.
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