5 Aspects That Make Our Intuition Unreliable and Inconsistent
5 Aspects That Make Our Intuition Unreliable And Inconsistent
Human Intuition or gut feeling is perceived to be reliable, accurate and that we should rely on this more to make our decisions predictions and run our businesses. I believe that in leading and managing in business it must be a synthesis of evidence and intuition. Not everything is in the data but nor can a business be completely lead or managed by intuition.
How our intuition works and it’s limitations have been researched at length. The research clearly shows some limitation that we need to be aware in leading and managing our businesses.
1. We apply intuiton inconsistently.
Even experts have been found to be inconsistent. It has been found that Doctors in determining how they diagnose patients those with a clearly defined model did a better job of diagnosing the new cases than humans whose knowledge was used rather than the evidence based models. In other words their intuition varied. Models though don’t have intuition. So the Doctors armed with models and being able to use their intuition within that framework had a better clinical outcome. The same is the principal in business that having the evidence or the model or framework allows us to operate business more efficiently and then applying the intuition within that framework.
2. It’s easier to make bad judgements quickly.
Our biases that we have affect us when we make decisions. There are plenty examples of this but to use an example that was in a recent Blog post on Harvard Business Review:- if you were to ask a group of people “is the average cost of German cars more or less than $100,000″ and then ask them to estimate the average price of German cars, they would anchor around BMW’s and other high end makes when estimating. If ask another group the same two questions but say is the average cost of German cars more or less than $30,000 instead they will anchor around VW and give a much lower estimate. How much lower? Well when this study was performed it turned out around $35,000 lower on average or half the difference between the two anchor prices. How information is presented affects what we think. This is powerful in that it shows the short coming of our intuition but it also shows the ability that if we present our information properly to our team then we can determine the decisions that assist in determining the decision that they will make.
3. Intuition only works well in specific environments ones that provide a person with good ques and rapid feedback.
A good que is a rapid indications on what is going to happen next. Feedback from the environment is information about what worked and what didn’t. So if the environment is perfectly suited up with these rapid ques and accurate feedback then intuition can work. Unfortunately the environments where this is the case are few and far between.
4 It takes a long time to build intuition.
Malcolm Gladwell talks of 10,000 hours rule. This is that it takes 10000 hours of application to become expert at a particular area. It is understood that chess players need approximately 10 years of studying competition to assemble a mental repertoire of patterns to allow them to compete at the upper level. It is only after many years that intuition can be fine-tuned to be consistently accurate subject to the correct environment as discussed above.
5. We don’t know where our ideas come from.
There is no way for even an experienced person to know if a spontaneous idea is the result of expert intuition or of a pernicious bias. In other words we have lousy intuition about our intuition.
These 5 reasons show the shortfall in relying on our intuition. What are your thoughts?
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