It never ceases to amaze me how if you aim your attention at something you suddenly discover that thing in many places. For example, last post, The Power of Why, I talked about emotion and gut feel as the underlying driver of decisions. Next thing I know, I’m seeing things about trusting your gut everywhere.
It even turns out the Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, claims that intuition…gut feel…makes our decisions not just quicker but better.
Gigerenzer says complex problems often do not need complex solutions. More analysis leads to paralysis, not solution. Even worse, more analysis often makes the decision worse rather than better.
All good executives know this. Over a glass of wine they’ll admit that many of their decisions are based on gut feel and intuition. Since it’s a bit hard to defend this in public, after the decision is made they often go to great efforts to produce lengthy reports disguising the fact that they’ve already made the decision.
It’s all about focus. Extra information just distracts you from paying attention to the few important aspects of the issue that really matter. You get overwhelmed with extraneous facts that have nothing to do with the real problem and so go off on tangents or wind up paralysed by the fear that you missed something.
In her book on strategic thinking…that’s strategic thinking, not strategic planning…Julia Sloan interviewed CEOs from the world’s leading companies and found that they all depend on private time with their own thoughts to free their gut to guide their most important decisions. In Learning To Think Strategically she describes this much more eloquently.
Her book is actually an interesting example of needing to take hundreds of pages to explain and verify that the best decisions generally aren’t really based on huge amounts of research but come from allowing all you know to jumble about freely inside you head until your gut is happy with the result.
Good decisions come from having plenty of diverse experiences that expand your view, keeping clear of assumptions that constrict your options, being careful not to clutter up your brain with too many facts, and then letting your thoughts run free.
Try it next time there’s a fork in the path ahead of you. Trust your gut.