Peter Honey
By Peter Honey (December 2005 Issue)
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Over the years I have worked with lots of managers I would describe as intuitive. The self-made owner of an airline, for example, who prided himself on being a superb negotiator, but hadn’t got a clue how he did it. The director of a pharmaceutical company who chaired board meetings with consummate skill and was astonished when I listed some of the things he had done well.
His reaction was, ‘I never realised I was doing that’. Both managers could demonstrate their expertise, but not describe it. Professor Eugene Sadler-Smith1 of the University of Surrey’s School of Management has been conducting research into the nature of intuition, how it can be fostered, and its practical applications in organisations.
Helpfully, he is at pains to dismiss the idea that intuition is instinctive. If it was instinctive it would be one of those depressing ‘born not made’ qualities beyond the reach of those who, through no fault of their own, failed to inherit the necessary equipment, genes or whatever. He is also keen to distinguish between intuition and insights – those ‘aha’ moments when an answer to a problem unexpectedly pops into your head. The main difference is that an insight can be articulated, whereas something intuitive can be done, but not explained.
Now, this is all a bit embarrassing for a management trainer like me who has invested considerable effort in getting managers to make conscious the things they do superbly well unconsciously. I think of all those case studies I used to inflict on managers where they were invited to analyse a tricky situation and work out how best to deal with it. One exercise on assertiveness broke possible responses down into five categories from ‘gently assertive’ to ‘still assertive, bordering on the aggressive’. This was enough to reduce managers who were intuitively assertive to gibbering wrecks! My aim was to get managers to stop and think about their behaviour and its likely impact on others. I was convinced that managers needed a good dose of rational thinking to counter their tendency to lurch around on a spontaneous ‘shoot from the hip’ basis.
However, I’m falling into the trap of treating this as an ‘either/or’ issue; either you behave intuitively or you behave rationally. Professor Sadler-Smith doesn’t see it this way. He sees intuition as the point where expertise (i.e. the accumulation of lots of experiential learning), emotion and cognition meet. This makes intuition not only a useful ‘and’, but also something acquired and therefore learnable. How can we help people to make good intuitive decisions?
Professor Sadler-Smith has a number of suggestions:
1. We can accelerate the process by deliberately exposing managers to lots of complex and messy problems so that they build up a database of patterns they can draw upon.
2. We can promote the observation and imitation of intuitive role models as they handle tough situations.
3. We can create ‘kind’ learning environments that legitimise intuition. This could include coaching and timely feedback, encouraging managers to trust their intuition more.
4. We can train managers in various techniques to bypass the rational mind – reflection and meditation being just two.
Fascinatingly, Professor Sadler-Smith’s research shows that senior managers use intuition more than middle or junior managers. This may, of course, be because they have had time to do more experiential learning and build up their expertise. Or it might be because organisations have a built-in bias and tend to promote people who make ‘good’ intuitive decisions.
My own theory is that senior managers have ‘discovered’ (in quotation marks because the discovery itself is intuitive) that decisions arrived at intuitively require less effort and less time. They have also developed superb rationalising skills that, if challenged, they can draw upon to make it sound as if the decision was based on a thorough analysis of the available data. In other words, they are in a better position to get away with it!
Bless the CEO who, when challenged to make a business case for his decision to roll out an expensive diversity awareness programme, conceded that ‘it just felt like the right thing to do’.
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