The situation is chaotic. Here, too, instinct is better than analysis. The only thing you can do is act. "You impose order," Snowden says. "That's where charismatic leaders come in." After Enron imploded, a team of crisis executives from Kroll Zolfo Cooper parachuted in to save what's savable and dismantle the rest in an orderly way. One of them, Michael France, has the job of putting together a business plan for OpCo, a possibly viable energy business.

When he landed, the entire operation was in chaos. "People were afraid," France recalls. "They were either misdirected or undirected. Decision-making was paralyzed. You don't have much time. You've got to be quick and decisive -- make little steps you know will succeed, so you can begin to tell a story that makes sense." This quick-twitch sort of decision-making is akin to the firefighter whose gut makes him turn left or the trader who instinctively sells when the news about the stock seems too good to be true.

Behind many of the errors in decision-making lies a yearning for the "right" answer: If only we get enough data, if only we examine all the alternatives, we'll know what to do. "People tend to spend all their time looking for rules," Snowden says. "They're kidding themselves." Situations in which rules supply all the answers are becoming an endangered species, in business and everywhere else. Command-and-control management went out with tail fins. Risks are both greater and less predictable. As companies outsource, globalize, and form alliances, they become more interdependent -- simultaneously competitor and customer, drastically increasing the complexity of their relationships. More and more, all you can do is admit that you simply don't know and go with your gut.

This may well feel uncomfortable. No one likes uncertainty, and it's going to be hard to explain to your boss a hunch you can't really articulate, even to yourself. To make things easier, you can teach yourself to tune in more attentively to intuition and to raise your gut IQ. On the other hand, making decisions this way may come more easily than you think. Chances are that the classic linear model you thought you were following -- data comes in, you analyze, draw inferences, make a decision -- was partly an illusion anyway. "The data doesn't just 'come in,'" Klein points out. "You have to figure out where you're going to look -- and that is an intuitive process." In other words, you already are more of an intuitive decision-maker than you may have thought. So relax and listen. Your gut has something to say to you, and it might be important.

Thomas A. Stewart is the editorial director of Business 2.com.

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