Refining Intuition – Making better, faster decisions in complex contexts

Intuition is becoming more and more important as the world get more complex. And the time to respond gets ever shorter. It is increasingly difficult for rational decision making to take account of all the variables. Furthermore, those variables often change before the decision is complete.

As a result, we are finding more people relying on intuition. Or to be more specific, on heuristics. Basically, heuristics are mental shortcuts which embody the wisdom of our experience and insight. Some are conscious, like estimating the volume of a rubbish tip. But others may be less so – like deciding we have enough time to cross the road before a car reaches us. It is these less conscious heuristics that play a large part in our intuition.

Sadly however, heuristics are not always helpful. As examples, consider unconscious bias, our tendencies to prejudice, our addictions to gambling, and other bad choices. By and large, these are often a result of our heuristics. A list of the ways in which heuristics have been shown to let us down is surprisingly long. The diagram below (courtesy of John Manoogian III and Buster Benson) reflects a lot of potentially flawed thinking (not by them, I hasten to add).

The problem arises when we use particular heuristics in situations, or in a manner, which is not suited to them. And since much of our use of heuristics is largely unconscious, this can become a serious problem. Particularly in business situations where we will be using them more and more.

Conscious or unconscious, heuristics are a skill like any other. Poor outcomes are not a reason for abandoning these skills, they are a reason for developing them. And for creating an environment in which we can use them more effectively. So how do we do that? How do we set about refining our intuition?

As businesses face increasing levels of change, and local autonomy increases in order to cope with this, this question will naturally increase in importance. Businesses which find good solutions will aggregate better faster decisions, and will deliver better performance – and not just financially.

One solution is training. For example, many companies have greatly improved their ability to harness greater benefits from diversity through delivering unconscious bias training. In essence, helping people to take more conscious control of their stereotyping heuristic.

To be clear, stereotyping can be an extremely helpful heuristic. Specifically, it enables us to arrive at very fast and reasonably accurate predictions of how complex systems might respond to changing situations. However, it can be very unhelpful when we apply it unconsciously to people.

Heuristics themselves are not good, or bad, but our application of them can be. However, it is impractical to train people on every single heuristic (there are over 200 listed in Wikipedia). Therefore, businesses will need to find mechanisms by which people can better train themselves.

Key to enabling this is a collective decision making culture. One in which heuristics become clearer, and their application more transparent. This enables people to develop implicit agreement on where and when to apply particular heuristics. Furthermore, it helps them to recalibrate their own use of them. And it is this recalibration that is key to refining our intuition.

To a large extent this is already happening as a result of a growing interest in autonomous teams supported by collaborative tools. As team members share perspectives on situations, their underlying heuristics become exposed. In this way people begin to learn together what works and what doesn’t. Thereby refining intuition together.

This naturally, almost effortlessly, helps to form cultural heuristics. In other words, patterns of thinking which are validated, proven and then collectively adopted and further disseminated.

Cultural heuristics can also exist in the processes adopted to provide the context for this learning.

Shared decision making tools such as fishbones, SWOT, six thinking hats, business canvas, force-field analysis and many others are themselves a heuristic device. They are a means of collective learning, discovery, and problem-solving in situations where outcomes are necessarily uncertain.

But they have an added advantage of breaking down complex issues into their component parts. Thereby enabling greater clarity over each element of the decision. And thus providing a much more explicit understanding of what personal heuristics are in play, and reconciling their conclusions.

Change grows ever faster, and our people become increasingly dependent on personal heuristics to make their decisions. Therefore, our need to help them to ensure that these are effective heuristics becomes more pressing. Rethinking our meeting and decision making processes is the best means we have to refining intuition.

For more on cultural heuristics, take a look at our main article.

For meeting tools that act as cultural heuristics in their own right. And which also help to recalibrate personal heuristics, take a look at our tool selector.

To explore greater meeting participation as a basis of continuing heuristic readjustment, take a look at our main piece on agile collaboration.

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