Certainly it would be expected of you to take such a position ;-) Honestly, it wasn’t a slight at Slow Leadership… it was just an easy reference to make to address an alternate opinion.

However, I would like to point out that I wasn’t advocating making intuitive decisions without doing any of the homework first. Research has generally indicated that if you gather all of the necessary information, your subconscious mind is better at sorting it out than your analytical conscious mind. I would hardly call this magic. Rather, it’s a function of brain chemistry.

I’m just not satisfied with the answer that every decision should be completely analytical, thoroughly documented, and reviewed upon completion. There’s no denying that some of the greatest minds in business are adept at making decisions that rely more on “intuition”, whatever the scientific definition may be.

However, I’ll admit there could be another side to this: being completely analytical tends to equate to being risk averse, something that will never jive well with the extremes of seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurship. It could just be more convenient to ignore rational thoughts in favour of taking broader risks.

Take a look at Klein and Claxton Carmine. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

As the guy who wrote, “It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small… It’s the FAST that Eat the Slow,” I was.

The genuine kind arises only after long periods of intense thinking, analysis, and experience. It’s what you see when a true expert seems to jump instantly to the right decision with seemingly no thought at all. That decision making is so swift and sure it looks like magic, but only because you are unaware of all the prior work that went into making it.

I’m a birder and novice birders often view experts with a kind of awe. These “gods” appear to be able to identify birds on the basis of something less that a glance in their direction. How do they do it? For a start, they have done it a lot, and I mean a lot, so they have internalized the general size, shape, and flight patterns of hundreds of bird species. Secondly, they have studied bird habitat for years, so they can instantly reject many supposed alternative identifications, purely by knowing those birds will not be found in this habitat. Most are also masters of remembering bird calls. The novice sees a blur disappearing into a bush. The expert sees exactly the same, only she recognizes the brief call it made as it flew. All this appears magical, but it’s just the result of long, slow, patient learning.

The other view of intuition, the Gladwellesque view, is about magic. It assumes that in some magical way, you can find the right answer with neither knowledge nor thought. It’s “proofs” are nearly all anecdotal. Of course anyone can find occasions when a decision made with every care fails, and contrast this with another occasion when jumping to a conclusion with no thought at all produces a terrific result. What is the cause? Chance. But people want “good” reasons for events and chance isn’t one that many people like. So, ignoring the wise counsel of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham (Occam’s razor) they invent a new entity (intuition coming from the unconscious mind) to account for what they have observed.

But then, as the founder of Slow Leadership, I would take this view, wouldn’t I?

Another great source is Guy Claxton and his “Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.”

And the perfect solution is to stop insisting on a perfect solution. That’s just an excuse for doing nothing.

“Gary Klein studies decision-making in the field, tagging along with firefighters, standing by in intensive-care units, and watching chess masters play lightning-fast “blitz” games to learn how people make choices with time constraints, limited information, and changing goals. From this research, he and his associates have developed a theory of “naturalistic decision-making.”"

I would argue, however, that the extensive review procedure found in the post by Rob might be counterproductive because you would spend a lot of time trying to quantify something that is inherently unquantifiable. Hmmm, what is the perfect solution?