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Trusting Your Gut

March 29, 2010

In a recent McKinsey Article, “Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?”, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and psychologist Gary Klein debate the power and perils of intuition for senior executives.  Being in the business of business intelligence, I was at first shocked at the premise that there would be a time to trust your gut.  After all, I’ve been telling execs for years that data, not intuition, should be the premise for making key business decisions.  *Breathe* They agree.   :-)

What I found most interesting was that while they gave credibility to the strength of one’s intuition, they cautioned not to be seduced by overconfidence.  They noted that most executives are promoted because of the confidence that they project which makes them more likely to be leaders in the first place.  This confidence can cause others to trust the intuition of an exec because the exec believes they they themself are right.  Hmmm…interesting point.

I think in my next BI engagement I’ll be adding a new dimension to the cube:  Exec Intuition.  We can plot that as a 1 (yes) or a 2 (no) and then analyze how often their intution is correct.  :-)

 – Jodie

Written by Jodie Heflin · Filed Under Business & Leadership, Business Intelligence, LUCRUM News 

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