Intuition is an important part of decision making. If you can access it and use it well, it will serve up better decisions and stronger results.
There’s a reason why we use phrases like ‘listening to your gut’, or ‘letting your heart speak’. Both our gut and our heart have complex networks of nerve cells. Medical scientists even talk about a ‘gut brain’.
Your gut brain (properly, your enteric nervous system) doesn’t do thinking, it does interact with your brain. It makes a good metaphor for accessing your deep experience and applying it to the current situation. So, there’s a lot of sense in letting your intuition inform your decisions.
Our Exploration of Intuition
In this article, we’ll explore:
- What Do We Mean by Intuition?
- Developing Your Project Management Intuition
- How to Access Your Intuition
- The Importance of Data in Using Intuition
- Where to Look for Your Intuition
- How to Sharpen Your Intuition
- A Final Caution about Intuition
We’ll start, as I often do, by defining terms.
What Do We Mean by Intuition?
Intuition is when we just ‘know’ something, without thinking carefully about it – or even gathering full evidence. I put ‘know’ in inverted commas because often, intuition can let us down. What we know through intuition is often not true.
So, you need to be careful what you wish for. A powerful intuition can be convincing, yet lead you astray.
Thin-slicing
I like the metaphor that Malcolm Gladwell uses in his popular science book, ‘Blink’. He refers to intuition as ‘thin-slicing’. It’s as if our brains are able to perceive the huge array of information in a complex situation, and cut a thin slice through it, to get to the most salient facts. From these, it forms its judgment. That’s intuition.
It seems to me that Gladwell’s book leans heavily on the work of research psychologist, Gary Klein. Any serious project manager would do well to read his books. I especially recommend ‘The Power of Intuition’.
Expertise Matters
Klein researches intuition and, in particular, when we can rely upon it. Intuition works best when you have deep expertise. Any project manager might have an intuition about this or that topic. But for reliable intuition, you need a lot of experience.
Experience builds the neuron connections in your brain. These allow you to create a rapid assessment of a complex situation. This can shortcut rational consideration in a productive way. It’s faster than considering all the details, but the experience makes it accurate nonetheless.
Another book every project manager should read is Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking: Fast and Slow’. In this book, he shows how rapid intuitive thinking usually lets you down.
Our brains prefer to take mental shortcuts. So, they follow ingrained thinking patterns called heuristics. In short, Klein says, ‘Rely on your intuition’, while Kahneman says, ‘Don’t. It will let you down.’
How can we reconcile Klein’s and Kahneman’s work?
The key is that Kahneman’s research looks at the brain applying simple heuristics to multiple problems. Klein’s focus is on people applying heuristics in familiar contexts.
Long experience of complex situations allows your brain to develop and access reliable shortcuts. Applying your intuition outside of areas of deep expertise is dangerous. Context matters.
Developing Your Project Management Intuition
The upshot of this is simple. To develop a project management intuition you can rely on, you must practice as a project manager for a long time.
And I would go further. What you need is deep familiarity with a set of complex situations. So, this means a degree of specialization. Also, a career where you work on ever-more complex and demanding projects. Doing the same types of project, again and again, will only hone your intuition in a very narrow range of circumstances.
Reflective Practice
There’s something else you can do. It’s easy to have an experience and then move on. To hone your intuition further, build reflective practice into your work routine. Take time out regularly to reflect on your experiences. Make notes on the things that happen, the decisions you take, and the way events play out.
It’s less important that you try to draw conclusions than it is to consider and record what happens. Your brain will start to form the neural connections of its own accord. These links are the basis for intuition.
How to Access Your Intuition
Sometimes it can be hard to hear your intuition. In a cluttered mental landscape or a pressured external environment, accessing your inner wisdom is hard – perhaps impossible.
And these are also the times when it’s hard to think carefully about the facts of the situation. So, in these cases, our brains often default to careless shortcuts. We jump to conclusions. And they are often wrong.
The same busy-ness of day-to-day project life that robs us of the time to think, also drowns out the quiet voice of your intuition. To better access your intuition, you need to make time to ponder. Take a walk, savor a cup of coffee, or just sit quietly. Then, remind yourself of the problem at hand or the question you want to answer.
Meeting Room 5
On one project I led, I would often record my whereabouts as ‘Meeting Room 5’. One day, a colleague pulled me up on this. ‘We were looking for you,’ he said, ‘and there are only four meeting rooms in the building.’ That was because Meeting Room 5 was the local coffee shop. It was there I did my best thinking – for half an hour, every week.
Hold Your Question
Of course, to access your intuition, you need to be clear about the question you want it to answer. So, spend time framing the question and getting clear in your mind what you want to know. A lot of the heavy lifting in resolving problems happens when you work to understand the problem. Go deep enough to frame it clearly. The right answer will only come in response to the right question.
Then, allow your brain to mull; to hold the question and give your intuition time to work on it. That’s why in the UK we have a saying that you should ‘sleep on a problem’.
Typically, it will be when you are least busy that your brain will give you access to the answer it’s found. That’s why so many people report having a brain wave while in the shower, walking to work, or while daydreaming.
The Importance of Data in Using Intuition
Intuition is your brain’s way of synthesizing vast amounts of information and drawing a conclusion, based on recognizing a pattern deep within the data. So, to prime your brain’s pattern-recognition, you need to feed it constantly, with good-quality data.
Pay Attention
Start noticing what’s going on around you. Pay attention to the small details of your environment, of what people do and say, and the way they do and say things. In fiction, Sherlock Holmes’s intuition arose from the acuity of his observation. Start looking and listening for subtle clues.
‘To a great mind, nothing is little,’ remarked Holmes, sententiously.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
What Does Your Body Think?
It’s not just external data that matters when you want to tap into your intuition. There are plenty of clues to your unconscious feelings about a situation in the way your body reacts.
- How are you breathing?
- Is there tension in your neck or shoulders?
- How fast is your heart beating?
- What is your posture like?
- When you are with someone, does their presence make you relax or feel jumpy?
And, do you remember the importance of your gut-brain? Sometimes you can access your intuition via your enteric nervous system. Do you feel a queasiness, a rumbling, or butterflies in your stomach? You may just be hungry, or perhaps your gut has a message for you.
Where to Look for Your Intuition
To access your intuition, you often need to find the right place. There are two opposite solutions, both of which can feed your intuition and give you access to it.
The Gemba
Japanese industry often uses the concept of ‘going to the Gemba’ as a part of problem-solving. As a project manager, I’ve found this a valuable approach, even before I knew a name for it. The Gemba is the place where something happens. Sitting in an office thinking about a problem is rarely as effective as going to the scene. You can talk to the people there, see things for yourself, and gather data.
If you like this video and want more detail, check out our other video, How to do a Gemba Walk.
Get away
But sometimes, you need to get away from a situation. Take a proper break, change your environment, get moving. Sometimes it helps to be on your own.
That’s why Meeting Room 5 worked so well for me. It was there that I spotted what was coming around the next bend on a long and complex project.
Random Stimulus
What if neither the Gemba nor getting away help? Then take a page out of the creativity playbook. Feed your intuition with some random stimulus.
Browse the web for interesting articles, visit a museum, read a magazine. New ideas are like the tiny grain of sand around which an oyster grows a pearl. They catalyze new thinking and often give you an insight into the question you are holding.
How to Sharpen Your Intuition
Let’s make a couple of last passes over the strop to put a perfect edge on your intuition.
‘What if?’
Scenario planning is a perfect approach to let your intuition out and put it to the test. Mentally rehearse good and bad scenarios, gentle and extreme. This will give your intuition a range of outcomes to ponder. After considering them, how do you feel about the decision now? Excited or fearful; calm or empty?
This is the basis of one of Gary Klein’s best contributions to us as Project Managers. I love his Pre-mortem Technique. Take a look at this video, which explains it:
Neither a Yes, nor a No
Applying your intuition effectively means avoiding the artificial constraints of do or do not, yes or no, in or out. Instead, look for what’s interesting. Find alternatives to the easy polarities. Life is rarely as simple, and if you allow your intuition to find the easy answer, it could as easily be wrong. So, look for alternative directions you could take. Maybe there is a ‘third way’.
Reading, Listening, Watching
What makes good literature or drama good? Often, it is the realistic portrayal of human relationships on the page or stage. So, to sharpen your intuition about human behavior, a great plan is to:
- Read good books – or listen to them as audiobooks
- Watch great movies and television shows
- Listen to good radio plays
- Go to the theatre
It’s a hardship, I know. But it’s career-building work.
(Sadly, I suspect PMI, APM, and other professional bodies will not grant you PDUs or CPD points for going to the movies. Perhaps they should!)
A Final Caution about Intuition
Your intuition can get it wrong. And sometimes, badly.
Some of the experience it hooks onto may not be relevant, and this leads to bias and error. If you don’t have enough depth of experience, this becomes increasingly likely. This is what a lifetime of research (for which he won a Nobel Prize) taught Daniel Kahneman. He covers it splendidly, in his book, ‘Thinking: Fast and Slow’.
And that’s the reason why the best project managers are often coolly calculating, careful, and rational.
Test Your Intuition
It is all too easy to fall for the confirming evidence trap of looking only at evidence that supports your conclusion. So, for most rigor, focus on a search for details that go counter to your intuition. Test your ideas and try to break them before you implement them.
You should always test your intuition by:
- Looking for evidence.
Confirming evidence is good. A rigorous attempt to find disproving evidence and failing is even better. - Doing the analysis.
Working through the problem is good. Doing a scenario analysis is better. - Getting a second opinion.
An expert is good. A concerted red-team review is better. - Making a test.
Trying it with a contingency plan is good. A series of low-risk experiments is better.
Intuition: How it Works and What to Do when it Fails You
This video explores the topic of intuition further:
What is Your Experience of Developing and Deploying Your Project Management Intuition?
As always, I look forward to reading your experiences, comments, and questions. I’ll respond to each one.
This article first appeared on ProjectManager.com
