I recently enjoyed a great listserv conversation with colleagues from the Association of Professional Futurists (one of the great benefits of being a member is the ability to have these kinds of discussions with professional colleagues). I’m posting my contribution here, revised a bit based on subsequent posts from the discussion .

In doing the research for ConsumerShift, I looked at intuition a bit. My favorite source, which was recommended to me by Chris Ertel of GBN several years ago, was Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work. He defines intuition as “the way we translate our experience into action.” His point is that intuition derives from experience, thus we tend to be better at intuition in areas that we have a lot of experience. I’ll bet that many of us who lead workshops, for instance, as we’ve gotten more experience, we “know” when to make certain adjustments or use certain approaches on the fly. We trust our intuition because we have a lot of experience that we’re drawing upon. As many have noted, this is by no means infallible.  I’m sure we all have a few stories of where our “adjustments” fell flat, but for the most part, I’d say it usually works out. On this, Klein says “Our experience lets us recognize what is going on (making judgments) and how to react (making decisions)…..we can therefore make decisions more rapidly and without conscious awareness or effort.” He adds the appropriate caution: “We need intuition—balanced with analysis because intuition is fallible.” So it’s not either/or but both/and.

He had a cool model of how the process works: Situation->generates->cues->that let you recognize->patterns->that activate->action scripts->which you assess by->mental simulation->using your->mental models->to affect the->situation

For this process to work, he notes that “In order to build an effective mental simulation, we need to have good mental models of how things work. This is another aspect of expertise, and another way that experience translates into action.” In sum, “The key to using intuition effectively is experience—more specifically, meaningful experience—that allows us to recognize patterns and build mental models.”

He notes several caveats on how it doesn’t apply to all situations and decisions, but what I got from it is that we can actually “practice” and build our intuitive capabilities.

A colleague appropriately pointed out that the approach I took relates to a “decision-in-the-moment.” That is true. AS I thought about it, I realized decisions-in-the-moment” could be about the future. During a scenario workshop, I think sometimes we guide the group on a future path based on intuition. Like, sometimes we’re struggling on where to go, and someone says something, and a light kind of goes on, and you “know” were to take the scenario (actually, that seems to happen a lot!).  Or in writing a scenario, and we need to make a decision about branch point or something like that, I suppose intuition could factor into that. We’re using our “experience” with the future to intuitively guide a group or own thinking. In that sense, maybe there is more of a link between intuition and foresight.

An interesting follow-up to that point was, “how often is that ‘aha’ moment actually on point?” Is it the case that many times these aha moments  turn out to be well, misguided. We didn’t reach any consensus on that, but an interesting point to ponder, and maybe someday an interesting research question/project.

Very enjoyable and interesting conversation! Andy Hines