I knew you were going to ask me that … Intuition – hogwash or (inexact) science? An fe₃ mindstretch® 19 May 2009

The views expressed here are the personal opinions of the individuals and not necessarily those of their organisations.

The following people were present at this mindstretch®:
Karen Drury, fe₃ consulting
Angela Gainsford, Transport for London
Keith Hackett, Intellego Health
June O’Sullivan, Westminster Children’s Services
Mark Peterson, Mental Health Foundation
Celia Richardson, Mental Health Foundation
Paul Rudd, Ministry of Justice
Gary Saunders, fe₃ consulting
Andrew Tucker, Birkbeck College
Jane Watkinson, Home Retail Group

Our venue was very generously provided by Birkbeck’s department for Corporate Governance.

After introductions Karen asked participants to say why they thought the concept of intuition is important.  Responses were:

• Seems to be devalued or not valued in the workplace, makes people sound woolly BUT needed at work especially in e.g. social care where LACK of intuition may be at the heart of what’s going wrong
• People at work are constrained by rules and scared to use it
• Personal, based on experience, but hard to articulate to others
• Antithesis of “governance”?
• Leadership component?

After introducing the agenda Slide2, Karen reported that she had been surprised at the lack of good studies in this area.  However, the conclusion from her literature search was that intuition may be important for the reasons on Slide3.  Nutt  (1999) reported that rational decision making strategies struggle to make the 50% mark for effectiveness.  Gary thought that many writers on strategic planning would agree with this.

The discussion then moved on to some conceptual problems with intuition Slide4.  Intuition seems to have remained immune to science – because measurement was so difficult, it has been parked in the philosophy box.  However, cognitive scientists have taken it on, albeit with some problems about how precisely to describe processes operating beyond consciousness, leading to a scarcity of terms to describe intuitive experiences

Given this, and also a lack of consensus about what intuition actually IS, comparisons across studies are difficult to make, causing problems for research replication and the appropriateness of measures.

Such research projects on intuition that exist are often qualitative and with very small samples.

Keith wondered why we need to make it more concrete.  Angela thought there was felt to be a need to link opinions t outcomes, rather than processes.  Celia thought there may be a desire to make it ok, that we are looking to explain something we look for when recruiting e.g. through the MBTI dimension “Intuiting”.

We went on to explore the need to label something to make it more acceptable and the dilemma of reductionism.  We discussed whether its origins might be biological or cultural; Paul thought that as binary organisms, even gut feel could be seen as a binary response, whereas Jane wondered if there was a cultural element.  Karen pointed out that traditionally intuition is associated with gender.

We looked at the academic definitions of intuition Slide5.  A review of the literature by Sinclair and Ashkenazy in 2005 found two broad categories of research.  The first is where researchers view intuition as an experience-based phenomenon that draws on tacit knowledge accumulated through experience and retrieved by pattern recognition.  The second is represented by research that stresses the importance of sensory elements and feelings during moment of intuition

There are some broad areas of agreement, however.  Because language is such a problem with intuition, it’s hardly surprising that the absence of consciousness is key here – researchers have had difficulty in getting research subjects to be able to verbalise their experiences.  The frequent use of metaphors and images in the intuitive process underlines this.

The notion of non-sequential or holistic information processing may come from the idea that intuition enables people to see the big picture.  Sinclair and Ashkenazy suggest that a more contemporary strategic perspective stresses the ability to synthesise unconnected pieces of information into something new, new thoughts.

This leads on to the last generally agreed element in the research – when intuitive processing is seen as a non-conscious scanning of pieces of seemingly disparate information in a seemingly haphazard manner, when the information starts to make sense, this is often accompanied by a feeling of relief or of “rightness”, and to the extent that the study of intuition is multi-disciplinary and multilevel, intuition is similar to emotion.
Keith brought in some research from Australia which concluded that intuition:

• Is a skilful, not random process that can be learned
• Is about the application of experience to analogous decisions
• May occur at a subconscious level

Gary wondered whether there was a link with the contrast between inductive and deductive reasoning.

Slide6 gives a bit more detail on the research. 

Many of the applications of intuition in the medical field draw on the notion that intuition is based on past professional experience and expertise  It precludes the use of intuition among novices because they lack the necessary experience and domain-specific expertise (Isenburg 1984, Simon 1987)  These researchers see emotion as interfering with the intuitive process.  However, this view of intuition as “expertise frozen into habit” (Hammond et al 1987) may reduce intuition into a form of “non-conscious analysis”

The idea of ‘somatic markers’ was developed by a team led by Antonio Damasio in 1997.  A somatic marker is a feeling state (unpleasant or pleasant) associated with a potential outcome (unfavourable or favourable).  These somatic markers (what we might refer to as ‘gut feelings) occur in the body but also may occur as a result of changes in the levels of chemicals in the brain.  Damasio’s view was that intuitive judgements occur as a result of the interaction of non-conscious pattern recognition and the activation of these somatic markers (somatic state activation).  Greater familiarity with the feeling states in our ‘body landscape’ can be cultivated using specific techniques and is one way of tuning-in to our intuitions.  Somatic markers are not infallible – they merely play a role in the processes of judgement and prediction in decision-making and problem solving situations.

Moving on from this, if we agree that decision making is not a purely rational process –and that feelings, whether we consciously attend to them or not, exert a strong influence on our preferences and judgments, this might happen before, during and after the process of intuition.

If we feel happy and confident, we might be prepared to rely on our gut feelings – if we feel low and worried, we might be more concerned about checking our facts.  How we feel might also influence what decision we make during the process and individuals may experience confirmation of the “genuine” nature of intuition through a specific feeling such as relief or certitude.

Those researchers with an affect-based perspective, while concentrating mostly on the role of emotion in the intuitive process, do acknowledge the importance of knowledge outside the individual’s domain of expertise as an important source of intuitive insight

Mark thought that novices would not be precluded form using intuition as there is no-one who has no experience, but they would need more support and a safety net.  Angela expanded on this, suggesting that intuition could be used within parameters, but also felt that we were still not clear why some people seem to retrieve the cues more easily than others.  We went on to debate the conditions for intuition; these were thought to include:

• Inclination
• Reinforcement and reward
• Trust
• Environment (which may be self-fulfilling)
• Self-confidence (moderated by difficulties of potential bias in e.g. selection)
• Motivation (Keith mentioned a study of middle managers in the public sector done by the Industrial Society that found these managers were motivated by the ability to take a decision that wasn’t simply the outcome of a process)
• Vision and clarity of goals (Paul gave the example of a former CEO of Lloyds Bank who created lots of shareholder value based on rapid decision making with limited analysis – i.e. gut feel)

June wondered whether there would be differences between public and private sector organisations and between large and small businesses.

We thought the idea of somatic markers was interesting: Angela reported that she had experienced of feeling that there’s something familiar about a novel problem.  Celia mentioned the use of cortisol markers in shoppers being used by advertising agencies.  Keith and Celia both thought there was a probable link with theories underpinning NLP.

Karen then introduced some work that combines the two strands of thinking Slide7.  Crossan et al in 1999 partially addressed the expertise/affect divide by distinguishing between expert and entrepreneurial intuition:

• Expert intuition relies on past pattern recognition; the process has become so internalised that it does not require any deliberate thinking but on deeper probing, it can be verbalised – links to tacit knowledge.  Weick calls this “compressed knowledge”
• Entrepreneurial intuition; enables decision makers to connect patterns in a new way – no prior knowledge required and may be preverbal – i.e. no language exists to describe the process

Mintzberg (1989) and Langley et al (1995) also argue that less experienced decision makers can be intuitive precisely BECAUSE they lack any preconceptions about the subject that might interfere with their ability to generate novel insights.

Andrew mentioned a study of traders which found their trading behaviour was more aggressive in the morning and performance also tended to be better; this appeared to be linked to higher levels of testosterone in the morning (the sample being predominantly male).  He thought that the characteristic of expert intuition is probably that the model is rational BUT the decision on what it means is intuitive.

Gary was concerned that over-rationalising intuition was simply missing the point; June agreed that it is clearly not a “mechanical” process, whilst Jane thought there may be a connection with emotional intelligence.  Keith and Paul thought that expert intuition may be facilitated by the use of metaphor and imagery.  Paul recalled an experience of using this with an FD who was initially wary of it, but suddenly found it helped him to make a breakthrough in his thinking.

Turning to entrepreneurial intuition, Andrew pointed out that words are important in getting it used: if you can’t write it down it can’t be accessed by others, so in business maybe there is a point in the development of the organisation when it’s size means it has to stop relying on intuition and move to a more rational footing.

Celia pointed out that it seems to be ok for children to be intuitive in their early years, but the process of education gradually moves them to the rational.  Finally, Karen mentioned two additional study findings: Slide8

• Although some research studies have identified a link and support the commonly held belief that women are more intuitive than men, many studies have not identified any significant differences – some studies reported women scoring higher on analysis than men
• Research has provided evidence for only some measure of specialisation between the hemispheres of the brain – it does not imply that either hemisphere (especially the right hemisphere) is capable of problem solving, decision making or discovery independent of the other.  Simon (1987) called the discussion around right and left-brain spheres to be a “red herring” – more important questions are “what is intuition?” and “How is it accomplished?”, not “Which side of the brain does it take place?”

We then move on to look at studies of the application of intuition.  The largest group focuses on chess masters Slide9.

Chess experts can play simultaneous games, sometimes against as many as 50 opponents and exhibit only a slightly lower level of skill than when playing one opponent.  Certainly, when playing multiple opponents, the chess player has only a few seconds to make a move – and from research, the player has no awareness of how the judgement was reached.

When asked about their skills, chess masters attribute their performance to their professional “judgement” – through frequent play, chess players gain the ability to recognise and process information in patterns or blocks that form the basis of their “intuitive” decisions.  The chess master’s mental structure not only organise the pieces but also suggests which line of play should be explored.  By establishing simple sub-goal heuristics (rules of thumb), they prune the branches of the decision-tree (Patton, 2003), making the problem much more manageable. Chess masters play at a higher level than novices in part because the chess master does not waste so much time and cognitive effort exploring unproductive pathways.

First, a grandmaster and a novice are presented with a position from an actual chess game, but one that is unfamiliar.  There are about 25 pieces on the board. After 5-10 seconds, the board is removed and participants asked to reproduce it.  The grandmaster can usually reproduce the whole position correctly, and on average will place 23 or 24 pieces on their correct squares.  The novice will only be able to replace on average, about 6 pieces.   In the second part of the experiment, 25 pieces are placed randomly on a chess board.  The process is repeated only this time, the novice AND the grandmaster can recall the place of about six pieces.

It’s clear that what the grandmaster is remembering is the pattern or chunk of information of a particular move or position and with it, it’s associated dangers, offensive and defensive moves it suggests. It’s this recognition that allows the grandmaster to play at such speed against multiple opponents – previous learning has stored the patterns and the information associated with them in memory makes this performance possible.

50,000 sounds a lot, but perhaps it’s not. The natural language vocabularies of graduates have been estimated to be in the range of 50,000 to 200,000 words.

The next area in which the application of intuition has been studied is the medical profession Slide10 and Slide11.

Research shows that clinical decision making occurs through the selective application of general rules to particular individuals and contexts.  The uniqueness of the individual precludes any purely rule-based method

Studies on the development of expertise in clinicians confirm that the more experienced a clinician gets, the less logical their decision making processes are shown to be.

There is a striking absence of studies showing that knowledge per se improves decision making.  It is well documented that merely having the knowledge at their fingertips in the form of the guidelines generally makes no perceptible difference to clinicians’ behaviour – significant change requires:

• Knowledge of best evidence AND
• A change in motivation and attitude
• Structural barriers (cost of treatment and availability)
• Clinician behaviour needs to be prompted and reinforced)

A number of studies by educationalists have begun to throw light on the process by which clinical expertise accumulates. First doctors learn detailed rules about the cause, course and treatment of each condition. As doctors gain knowledge they convert these rules to “scripts” – or stereotypical stories.  They refine their knowledge by accumulating atypical and alternative stories via experience and the oral tradition (such as grand rounds, corridor consultations and so on).  Furthermore, there is growing evidence that clinical knowledge is stored in the memory as stories rather than as structured collections of abstract facts.  (Hunter, 1996; McNaughton, 1996)

Some commentators consider that the two not only CAN, but SHOULD be combined – Back in 1958, Sir Peter Medawar suggested that “The initiative for scientific action comes not from the apprehension of facts but from am imaginative preconception of what might be true.”  In other words, it is intuition that drives progress in science.

Keith commented that the health service invests a huge amount of effort into simplifying patients and their symptoms into a small number of patterns.  Celia thought that it depends on the outcomes being sought.  She recalled Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”, in which he found that the likelihood of a surgeon being sued was much more closely linked to their relationship with the patient than to the outcome.  June agreed that there was plenty of evidence that the therapeutic relationship is linked to the outcome.

Celia quoted another study that showed that GPs over the age of 50 tend to make more holistic judgements than do younger colleagues.  Mark thought that ego too comes into it: openness to new knowledge vs. belief in own experience.  Angela thought these two might come together producing the effect of reducing the number of patterns they are willing to recognise.

The last area of application we looked at was to business Slide12.  On the question of how relevant intuition is to organisational decision making, empirical research supports the view that managers relay on intuitive judgement.  In a study in 1999, Burke and Miller asked US senior managers how often they used intuition in decision making:

• 12% said always
• 47% said often
• 30% said sometimes
• only 10% said seldom or never.

Parikh and colleagues, in one of the few global studies Karen found, surveyed 1,000 managers in 1994 and examined what managers considered intuition to mean.  The three most popular accounts were:

• A perception of decision without rational or logical methods
• An inexplicable comprehension that arrives as a feeling “from within”
• An integration of accumulated knowledge and previous experiences

In this study, Parikh et al found that managers are more likely to use intuition when solving poorly defined problems which don’t have existing precedents, normally associated with non-routine decisions.

Other researchers have found:

• In ambiguous situations decision makers tend to use intuition in conjunction with rational analysis (Burke & Miller 1999; Isenberg 1984)
• Intuition is most useful when the manager is faced with conflicting facts or inadequate information (Agor 1984)

HOWEVER – field studies in which managers acknowledge reliance on intuition are few and far between, according to Sinclair and Ashkenazy in 2005, and its use seems to be differentiated by job category, culture and personal characteristics.  They do acknowledge though, that the Western world is starting to allow the reintegration of such fuzzy concepts such as intuition.

On the question of the effectiveness of intuitive judgements, there is a SMALL body of literature that links the use of intuitive decision making positively to organisational performance in an unstable environment, but negatively in a stable environment.  Dane et al (2005) found that analytical decision making works better in structured tasks, whereas intuition is most effective compared to analysis when decision makers are domain experts who are facing tasks that are poorly/loosely structured.

A more recent study in 2007 by Ritchie, Kolodinsky and Eastwood, which looked at the relationships between chief executives’ intuitive decision style and non profit organisation performance, found that executive intuition was a significant and positive predictor of both organisational fiscal performance and one of two public support measures (US study).

Paul ventured that the literature led him to conclude that what he though of as intuition probably doesn’t exist.  Apparently random, unconnected events actually have a pattern and intuitive people are good at recognising patterns.  Celia added that one’s life experiences may make intuition very subjective and therefore potentially problematic.  Angela thought that even if it can’t easily be described, we still need to give permission t use it.  June agreed and thought that our obsession with qualifications rather than learning is stamping out intuition and common sense from decision making

Paul agreed, using the reports of the baby Peter case, it seems that more and more process was applied and had the effect of stopping the relatively inexperienced worker from seeing the pattern that really mattered.  Celia agreed that the use of intuition was a problem area for social workers.  Angela added that many people in a wide range of organisations are too busy filling in forms to look at what’s happening around them.

Celia thought that the use of stories and scripts chimed in with some of Eric Berne’s book “Games People Play” (from the Transactional Analysis movement).  Paul thought that we need to try a lot of approaches and keep what works and reminded us that major life decisions, such as choice of house or partner are often not very rational.

So how can we encourage intuition?  Some of our thoughts:

• Create the right environment (illustrated by Keith with reference to “Acts of Random Kindness” – Arks) – also see “Random Acts of Kindness” by Danny Wallace
• Setting an example; leading by doing
• Communicate illustrations of it e.g. story-telling
• Active listening
• Being open to others
• Put in management “systems” e.g. random lunches, after hours socials
• Recognition and reward
• Create a vision to give it parameters
• Give clear targets and then lots of discretion to deliver – work out what you need to control and let go of the rest
• Don’t over-focus on it: accept as a random occurrence and allow authenticity
• Encourage diversity of points of view and accept that an intuitive person may see things differently and may seem odd!
• Look for the right moment to use it e.g. when you need to take a risk

Karen then moved on to looking at the measurement of intuition Slide13.

The Intuitive Management Survey (AIM) is a very regularly cited intuition measure – one of the few to be used in management contexts by other researchers other than the developer.  The main objective of the AIM is to measure predisposition and further development of “the ability to make practical management decisions on the basis of feelings” even when faced with conflicting or inadequate information.  It was developed from the “intuition-sensing” items of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which assesses intuition and analysis as opposite poles of a continuum (see below).

The International Survey on Intuition (ISI) was developed for a cross-cultural study which is one of the very few pieces of large scale organisational research on the subject.  In the ISI, Parikh and colleagues argue that intuition is a multilevel and multi-contextual phenomenon.  Like the AIM, it views intuition and rationality as mutually exclusive.  The ISI was designed to explore how individuals interpret intuition rather than a general measure of its use.

The Rational-Experience Inventory (REI) – treats intuition and rationality as two independent dimensions i.e. not a continuum).  It tries to distinguish between engagement and ability on both scales.  Experiential engagement is the respondent’s favourable attitude to intuition and experiential ability is the preference to rely on intuitive impressions.  Ability is measured as a dispositional preference, not actual use.

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Slide14 uses a four scale structure for identifying and categorising an individual’s behavioural preferences, based on Carl Jung’s theories and his translated descriptive words.

Each of the four MBTI scales represents two opposing preferences (preferred styles or capabilities).  Here, the elements that are most relevant to the discussion are around the S and N preferences – S demonstrates a preference for gathering information by focusing on the facts within information; N gathers information by interpreting patterns, possibilities and meaning from information received.

Moving towards the end of the session, we considered whether intuition can be taught Slide15.  Patton describes three sources of intuitive thinking:

• Responding to gut feelings appropriately is innate or inborn – and cannot be learned
• The learning that occurs in the normal process of aging and accumulating experience.  To make this more effective, managers require heightened sensitivity to the situations and decisions, and the habit of regularly analysing successful and unsuccessful outcomes may bring this greater awareness.  Add in an evaluation of the assumptions which prompted the decision, and this should also be beneficial on outcomes.
• Focused learning is the component of intuitive thinking Patton believes is the areas where most improvement can be made.  He believes that this is where the “regular drill” enables actions which are delivered instantaneously to be placed “in the muscle”

June thought that intuition was related to intelligence in the sense that you need the spare capacity for the intuition to occur.  Paul agreed, saying that there is never a complete absence of pattern and intelligence is at least partly about seeing patterns more quickly.  Gary thought there might be mileage in teaching people how not to see just the established patterns – especially to develop entrepreneurial intuition.  Keith thought that sometimes the process of being taught can help a person to change: “sometimes you need a certificate to say you are clever.”

On a slightly different angle, Celia pointed to the MHF research that shows that physical exercise is the most effective anti-depressant and may also help people to access different parts of the brain. 

Finally, we looked at arguments for and against the use of intuition.  We agreed with Weick Slide16 and in the current environment, perhaps we don’t need to make arguments for its use.

Turning to arguments against its use Slide17:

• Intuition is seen by some as a continuum where at one end, decision making is driven by an emotional reaction to a situation and at the other, where it simply augments rational decision making, relying on previous experience
• Issues of governance with an increasingly litigious environment
• Danger – would you rather your doctor spent TIME helping you, or reached a conclusion based on what they’ve seen before?
• The limit to working memory and also long term memory access – memory is a reconstructive process, inherently prone to errors of commission and omission, in contrast with the view that some memories in some people’s minds are somehow especially stable, and resistant to interference, distortion, forgetting etc  (eyewitness evidence)
• In organisations – the loss of organisational memory through delayering and cutback in jobs and information overload

We thought that rules can be important; at least you have to know the rules before you can break them!  We concluded that the main restraints on the use of intuition in organisational life are:

• Litigation
• Danger of prejudice
• Safety
• Danger of self-delusion
• Chaos/lack of responsibility

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