One of the most common pieces of decision-making advice is to trust your gut, but is that really the case? Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, PhD, sat down with psychologist Gary Klein, PhD, and reporters at McKinsey Quarterly to discuss the issue of when leaders should trust their instincts and when they should ignore them.
Here are three highlights from their conversation.
1. Your gut is just one piece of the puzzle "You need to take your gut feeling as an important data point, but then you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it, to see if it makes sense in this context. You need strategies that help rule things out," Dr. Klein said.
2. Understand the circumstances. "There are some conditions where you have to trust your intuition. When you are under time pressure for a decision, you need to follow intuition. My general view, though, would be that you should not take your intuitions at face value. Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity. If people can construct a simple and coherent story, they will feel confident regardless of how well grounded it is in reality," Dr. Kahneman said.
3. Experts don't always know best. "This is an area of difference between Gary and me. I would be wary of experts' intuition, except when they deal with something that they have dealt with a lot in the past. Surgeons, for example, do many operations of a given kind, and they learn what problems they're going to encounter. But when problems are unique, or fairly unique, then I would be less trusting of intuition than Gary is. One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others. So experts don't know exactly where the boundaries of their expertise are," Dr. Kahneman said.