As we practice any skill, our intuition grows. And Project Management intuition is no different. It’s a way to cut through complex problems and quickly infer answers that could take a lot more work if you rely solely upon analysis. But it’s a subtle thing that can trip you up just as easily. So, in this article, I will explore what it is, why it matters, and how you can develop it.
7 Steps to Develop Your Project Management Intuition
The specific questions I will address in this article are:
- What Do We Mean by Intuition?
- Developing Your Project Management Intuition
- How to Access Your Project Management Intuition
- The Importance of Data in Project Management Intuition
- Where to Look for Your Project Management Intuition
- How to Sharpen Your Project Management Intuition
- When to Use Your Project Management Intuition: A Final Caution
We’ll start at the beginning…
What Do We Mean by Intuition?
Intuition is an important part of decision-making. 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’.
Although your gut brain (properly, your enteric nervous system) doesn’t think I the normal sense, it does control your digestive system, and it interacts with your brain. So, there’s a lot of sense in letting your intuition inform your decisions.
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.
Knowing when to use your intuition is an important topic.
Thin-slicing
I like the metaphor that Malcolm Gladwell uses in his popular science book, ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking’. He refers to intuition as ‘thin-slicing’. It’s as if our brains can perceive the huge array of data and facts in a complex situation, and cut a thin slice through it, to get to the most salient information. From these it forms its judgement. 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’. For those who want to go deeper, his book, ‘Sources of Power’, is a more scholarly description of the same topic. These two books are the source of much of my own understanding of intuition.
Expertise Matters
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. Intuition about things we know little or nothing about is unlikely to have any reliability; it is most likely to lead you astray.
Experience builds the neuron-to-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, because it triggers you to focus on what matters most – Gladwell’s ‘thin slice’.
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.
Kanghneman vs Klein
How can we reconcile Klein’s and Kahneman’s work? The key is that long experience of complex situations allows your brain to develop and access reliable shortcuts. Relying on generic shortcuts, rather than context-specific ones learned through experience, is what leads to mistakes.
- Kahneman says that shortcuts are dangerous when they are not contextually relevant.
- Klein says that highly context-relevant shortcuts can give quick and accurate results.
Developing Your Project Management Intuition
The upshot of this is simple. To develop project management intuition that you can rely on, you must practice as a project manager for a long time. The more experience you gain, the more reliable your intuition becomes – and in a wider range of situations.
But 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. If you do lots of projects that are broadly the same, the range of applicability of your intuition will necessarily be narrow.
Reflective Practice
There’s something else, too. It’s easy to have an experience and then move on. To hone your intuition to a sharp edge, 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 to 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.
How to Access Your Project Management Intuition
Sometimes it can be hard to hear your intuition. 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.
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 access your intuition, you need to make time to ponder and allow your thoughts to bubble to the surface. 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 a nearby coffee shop. It was there that I did my best thinking – for half an hour, every week.
I would take a notebook and pen, turn off my phone, and think through what was going on, allowing new thoughts to emerge on their own. I could then write down any ideas I had..
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 hard to understand the problem in different ways. Go deep enough to frame the challenge clearly.
Then allow your brain the time 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, or while travelling.
The Importance of Data in Project Management Intuition
Intuition is your brain’s way of synthesizing vast amounts of information, and drawing a conclusion based on recognizing a pattern deep within that data. So, to prime your brain’s pattern-recognition, you need to feed it constantly with 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?
When you want to tap into your intuition, it’s not just external data that matters. 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 queasy, rumbling, or butterflies in your stomach?
Where to Look for Your Project Management 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. And then, there’s one more idea…
1. 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.
2. Get away
But sometimes, you get away from a situation. Take a proper break, change your environment, or 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.
3. 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 Project Management Intuition
Let’s make a couple of last passes over the whetstone to put a perfect edge on your intuition.
‘What if?’ – Scenario Planning
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. I made a six-minute video on this gem. Do take a look.
Neither Yes, nor 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’.
When to Use Your Project Management Intuition: A Final Caution
Your intuition can get it wrong – sometimes badly. Some of the experiences 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.
And that’s the reason why the best project managers are often coolly calculating, careful, and rational. So, test your hunch by looking for evidence.
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 the 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. The harder you test your ideas and still cannot find fault, the greater your confidence can be that they are correct.
Better still, get the smartest person you know to test your idea and challenge your thinking, red team style. If they can’t break your ideas, that’s another +1 point for your intuition in this case.
What is Your Experience of Using Your Own Project Management Intuition?
I’d love to hear your experiences, anecdotes, and insights. So pop them in the comments, and I promise I will respond.
Intuition is a better servant than master….
Nice!