Should managers rely on their intuition?

In 2005, Malcolm Gladwell,'s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking was published. It presented an interesting and relatively new theory: it might be sometimes better to take decisions based on intuition rather than carefully planned ones.

This theory can be extremely useful to managers. Taking decisions based on intuition avoids an unnecessary thinking process and allows managers to be much faster and more efficient.

Gladwell cites a study that shows that you can learn as much from one glance at a bedroom as you can from hours of exposure to a public face. What you avoid when you don’t meet someone face to face are all the confusing and complicated and irrelevant pieces of information that will screw up your judgement. It is what one might call overthinking or analysis paralysis. One of the main points made by the author is that unlike what we might think, we can do better by ignoring what seems like perfectly valid information. 

We live in a world saturated with information. We have unlimited amounts of data at our disposal but the key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in information but don’t know how to read it.

So, how exactly is this useful to managers? Gladwell's conclusion is that when experts make decisions, they don’t compare all available options. That is the way people are taught to make decisions, but in real life it is much too slow. Doctors, military leaders and firefighters would size up a situation almost immediately and act. 

According to the author, this is a matter of training and and rehearsal. It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a learning, watching and doing. Very often, these people rely on a small amount of information. To be a successful decision maker, you have to edit information and most often, our unconscious does that without even knowing it. It is what Gladwell calls thin-slicing.

For managers, delegating responsibilities to subordinates, allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly enables rapid cognition and more efficient work.

One of the other points made by the author is the notion of mind-blindness, caused by extreme stress and time pressure. Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled. If one of your subordinates makes a bad choice because he's under pressure, you should be comprehensive.