Intuition at Work: Following Your Gut To Better Outcomes

Jul 10, 2023

A brag to start: I was hiring for a role a bit back, and we’d narrowed it down to a final candidate everyone liked. I was reluctant. I wrote, “I don’t think there’s any way he’s working here in 6 months.” We hired him. He quit five months later. Maybe it’s not a brag - I shouldn’t have hired him, it was annoying to deal with. The point is intuition is real and you can learn to cultivate intuition and use your intuition.

Defining Intuition Rationally

Intuition is the ability to understand something instinctively. It can help us make decisions or process information. A caveat, intuition can lead to bad decisions if it is not based on accurate information or if it is used to justify decisions. I think of this in terms of Daniel Kahneman’s coined System 1 and System 2 thinking1.

System 1 & System 2 thinking | B2B frameworks

In work, it’s better to consciously know why you’re making a decision. Yet still, there’s a place for an unconscious feeling and using it. Your brain is an amazing information processor, it’s fast and complex and has been trained for years. So sometimes, information hits you, and you just feel a conclusion.

Growing Your Intuition

How do we learn to listen to our intuition and get better at understanding it?

First, I think you need to be present to take in information intuitively. It’s hard to have intuition when you’re checked out. Watch people, listen, take information in. Don’t do anything with the information. Intuition is not systematically judging, so don’t start trying to analyze. Just notice and move on.

Write down your predictions. When your spidey-senses™ start tingling, I think it’s worth take a moment to jot them down. Just write down what you think’s happening. Maybe what you noticed that made you feel that way.

Ask for others’ predictions. When someone intuits something that you didn’t think of, ask why. My old manager and I had a meeting with a prospect, it went well. I was excited about the business that was going to come. My boss 10 seconds out of the meeting said, “Nothing’s going to come of that.” I asked, why, what did I miss? My boss told me that the prospect had so many ideas of ways that we could work together but nothing seemed like a focus. My boss was right. Nothing ever happened. A small signal he’d learned over time.

Reflect on your predictions. “The ability to make quick, intuitive decisions is based on creating and cultivating self-trust,” said Dr. Dehra Harris, assistant director of applied performance research for the Toronto Blue Jays2. So you need to gain confidence in your intuitions. My recommendation is to every now and then go back to what intuitions you’ve written down and reflecting if they were right or wrong. Probably best not to over analyze it, just see, did it pan out?

The Value of The Inarticulable

Intuition is often dismissed. Listening to your gut makes for a great movie scene. But blurting out, I’m trusting my gut at your job when money is on the line doesn’t usually fly.

But how can you actually use intuition at work? You’re not going to put in a deck “I had a feeling.”

I failed to use my intuition in with my hire that didn’t pan out. I’m working to use those feelings more effectively at work.

Instead, I try using your intuition as an advisor pushing you in a new direction. An advisor is not going to make the decision for you. An advisor is not 100% right. But when they tell you something is worth exploring they’re probably right.

Use your intuition to:

Hedge against outcomes
Prompt you to look for more information
Explicitly state your bias

Yes, even stating, I feel odd about this can be helpful a work setting. Maybe other people are feeling it too. Maybe someone has data that backs up that funny feeling.

A friend of mine told me the other day she had a funny feeling about what was going on at work and thought some things were about to be shaken up. Lo, she was right. Major changes. She was more prepared cause she listened to her gut.

Intuitions are Biased

Last thing, and just want to be really clear. Often our intuitions are biased. Be careful when using your intuitions around people in different groups than you. You may just be 100% reading people wrong, which we all do from time to time. That’s why I say don’t go all in with every intuition. Life’s not a movie.

What have you intuited rightly or wrongly in the past?

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