Jackie Shimshoni: The Power of Intuition in Decision Making

Indecisiveness is worse than a mediocre decision

This line struck me in the article relating Marine corps thinking to decision-making in an organization.  As academics, the greatest fear is making a "bad" decision with relatively low levels of repercussions.  So to think about a situation in which lives literally depend on the decisions that are made, hearing that "fast" trumps "right" is powerful.  I was also fascinated by the way the article mentioned that decision-making could be taught, and it made me wish a class like that existed at Heinz.  It seems incredibly handy to break down the process of making a decision to the point that it can be done with increasingly accurate intuitive power.  

I looked up Gary Klein, the psychologist mentioned in the article, and found a great Fast Company article that went into more detail about his findings.  That article can be found here.  It discusses how accumulating a wealth of experiences increases the efficacy of decision-making because you learn what you are looking for.  Intuition, it argues, is different than gut feelings, and infinitely important in decision-making.  The article summarized it as: "intuition is really a matter of learning how to see — of looking for cues or patterns that ultimately show you what to do".  The image below summarizes the decision-making process that Klein suggests people make, and become faster at the more experiences they accumulate.

Image Source: C3Fire.org

In a way it is comforting because the article stresses the more expertise you build, the faster you can make decisions, which indicates that if one just presses on, eventually it will get easier.  The "bad" decision making that we fear, it turns out, is all a part of that process.  In another article, Klein states: “You can have 10 years of experience or one year of experience repeated 10 times.  It’s the people that reflect on what happened and what they learned and seek out new challenges that become the real experts. They can always tell you about the last bad decision they made because it is still needling them.”  So reflecting on what went right and what went wrong, being bothered by mistakes but still seeking them out, and generally being tenacious all seem core to becoming the quick and effective decision maker that can lead an enterprise, or really any organization.