Should you rely on intuition?

One of the games I play with my colleagues is : “Guess the relationship”. The rules of the game are simple. When we are in restaurants each of us makes a hypothesis about the relationship between people sitting at another table. We discuss our intuitive sense of their relationship. If everyone agrees to your hypothesis you have to get up and check at the table in question if your hypothesis is correct.

One night we were in a small restaurant in Latin America. I am not really a drinker but I had had a glass of wine, or two. At a certain moment a young woman came in with an older and a younger man. Both were deferential – bowing, pulling out her chair for her. Fueled Intuition plays a large part in expert decision making. To  accelerate learning we need to understand more about how intuition works so we can make better, faster decisions. As we saw in the previous article, intuition is based on learning from experience. People learn from experience in a number of ways, for example we make mental connections between things that happen together in time and space – we’re wired to notice frequencies. These connections then become reinforced in memory.

We are genetically more prepared to learn the significance of certain stimuli and because we are the product of evolutionary adaptations we also possess learning that was more useful to our ancestors than to us today. In real terms this means we tend to fear spiders and snakes more than we tend to fear traffic and crime.

The frequency of connection between punishments and rewards affects the ease of establishing connections, and once a connection has been reinforced In the real world intuition can be confused So, should we stop trusting our intuition? No, there are ways of building your intuition and learning when to trust it and when to question it.

Try the RATE to find out if your intuition can be trusted.

RATE: Radical Agile Transformation Exercise

Think back to an intuitive decision you made recently. Now ask yourself these questions:

1. What did I notice that supports my intuition?
2. What facts do I have that supports my intuition?
3. What people could I check in with to test this intuition?

Wait! Before you go…

Sari van Poelje has 30 years experience of innovation on the interface of leadership and organizational development, executive coaching and transactional analysis both as a director within several multinationals and as an international consultant. Specialization in creating agile leadership teams and business innovation! She is the author of numerous articles and books on leadership and change.