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How to Think With Your Gut
How the geniuses behind the Osbournes, the Mini, Federal
Express, and Starbucks followed their instincts and reached success.
By Thomas A. Stewart, November
2002 Issue
"One day I was home with strep
throat, and I saw a rerun of MTV's Cribs that featured the Osbournes' house.
They were such a dynamic family. I thought, "They would make great TV.'
So I set up a dinner with Sharon Osbourne, the kids, and two MTV executives.
We just wanted to watch them interact. Sharon was saying things like 'Remember
when Dad was in rehab?' and Kelly and Jack were just so colorful and sarcastic.
All of it hit in the gut so strongly. We never tested the show. We just
knew it would make great TV." -- Rod Aissa, vice president for talent development
and casting at MTV and for MTV's The Osbournes
Fred Smith brushed aside the C he received on the college economics paper
in which he outlined his idea for an overnight delivery service. His gut
told him it would work anyway. (Besides, the Federal Express (FDX) CEO
later explained, "a C was a very good grade for me.") Howard Schultz had
his eureka moment in Milan, Italy, when he realized that the leisurely
caffeine-and-conversation caffe model would work in the United
States too. Market research might have warned him that Americans would
never pay $3 for a cup of coffee. But Schultz didn't need research. He
just knew he could turn Starbucks (SBUX) into a bigger business,
and he began, literally, shaking with excitement.
Businesspeople retell these parables to refresh their faith in sturdy
virtues like risk-taking and creativity. But to researchers who study
how managers think, the tales carry an obvious moral: The most brilliant
decisions tend to come from the gut. While that observation is not new,
it is now backed by a growing body of research from economics, neurology,
cognitive psychology, and other fields. What the science suggests is that
intuition -- or instinct, or hunch, or "learning without awareness," or
whatever you want to call it -- is a real form of knowledge. It may be
nonrational, ineffable, and not always easy to get in touch with, but
it can process more information on a more sophisticated level than most
of us ever dreamed. Psychologists now say that far from being the opposite
of effective decision-making, intuition is inseparable from it. Without
it we couldn't decide anything at all.
| Getting in Touch With Your Gut |
It's simple, really: Just get out of your own way.
Psychologists have a term to describe people who are in unusually
close contact with their gut feelings -- "high intuitives." While
you can't teach such skills the way you teach multiplication tables,
everyone can hone their instincts to some degree. Here are a few
guidelines:
Practice, practice. This is the
most important thing. "Gut instinct is basically a form of pattern
recognition," says Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor and psychologist.
The more you practice, the more patterns you intuitively recognize.
List decisions you've made that turned out right -- and mistakes,
too. Then reconstruct the thinking. Where did intuition come in?
Was it right or wrong? Are there patterns? Highly intuitive people
often let themselves be talked out of good ideas. "Generally you're
better with either people or things," says Manhattan psychologist
and executive coach Dee Soder. If you're intuitively gifted about
people, write down your first impressions of new colleagues, customers,
and so on -- you want to hold on to those gut reactions.
Learn to listen. People come up
with all sorts of reasons for ignoring what their gut is trying
to tell them. Flavia Cymbalista has developed a decision-making
approach adapted from a psychological technique known as "focusing."
She calls it MarketFocusing, and she uses it to teach businesspeople
to find the "felt sense" that tells them they know something they
can't articulate. "You have to express your willingness to listen
to what the felt sense has to say, without an agenda of your own,"
she says.
Tell stories. Fictionalize a problem
as a business school case or as happening to someone else. That
can free up your imagination. Dave Snowden, director of IBM's (IBM)
Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity in Wales, has been
working with antiterrorism experts and finds that they think more
creatively if he poses problems set in a different time -- the Civil
War, for example. Another kind of storytelling is what cognitive
psychologist Gary Klein calls a "pre-mortem": Imagine that your
project has failed and gather the team to assess what went wrong.
Breed gut thinkers. Dismantle
the obstacles that prevent people from using their guts. High turnover
rates, for example, are inimical to developing the deep expertise
that hones intuition. Since gut feelings are inherently hard to
express, don't let people jump on a dissenter who hesitantly says,
"I'm not sure ... " Instead, say "Tell us more." Some leaders go
around the table twice at meetings to give people a chance to put
hunches into words. To sharpen your intuitive thinking, you have
to get out of your own way; to foster it among those around you,
you have to get out of their way too. |
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