Intuition or Analysis? Yes!

It’s a snowy Saturday afternoon in Minnesota, a perfect time to make substantial progress on the redesign of www.einsight.org, our online resource center. We’ll be re-launching the site with new content in Q1 of next year.   Before I turn to that, I wanted to share some thoughts from the week.  

 

Procrastination? Perhaps, but, a very sweet aspect of blogging is that it resembles both work and play.

 

The current question arose in a meeting with a client’s board of directors, presenting an organizational strategy developed with management and staff. It was well-received, and I think well-understood.   As we began to discuss strategic implications for project priorities, one member interrupted me. 

“This is way too analytical,” he said. “I know a good project when I see one.” He perceived a disconnect, and he attributed it, interestingly, to “a clash of Myers Briggs Types.” When someone asked him to say more, he observed that trying to create matrices to make decisions seems at odds with intuition, with gut feel. He then went on to clarify that he wasn’t denigrating intuition or analysis, just putting on the table his personal orientation toward intuition and against analysis, and in a sense, disqualifying himself from the discussion at hand.

 

It was the first time in my life that anyone has accused me of being too analytical.   I am a huge believer in intuition as a critical faculty and a critical factor in business success. At the same time, the tension between intuition and analysis can become a serious problem for leaders when one faculty or the other is misapplied, or when we aren’t able to bring both to bear to the greatest extent possible.

 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great book, entitled, “Blink,” on the subject of intuition and the phenomenon of “just knowing.” Gladwell wrote about the extraordinary power of intuition, as well as its limitations: when we ought to trust gut feel, and when we ought not. Among his key points is a strong argument that we can trust our intuitions in areas where we do, in fact, have knowledge and experience. (That may seem obvious, but the importance of it became clear to me when I reflected on the breadth of topics about which I have intuitions, and the narrower subset of areas about which I actually know something.) The book is a quick, lively read, and I highly recommend it.

 

The tension is particularly acute where ethical decisions are concerned. Most of us have a gut feel for when something is wrong. It is easy to conclude that that unethical conduct arises from ignoring our guts. There are real problems with that view of ethical reasoning, however. First, our guts – or, our intuitions – register lots of inputs at once: a sense of duty toward shareholders, an empathy for and commitment to employees, a strong desire to please customers, etc.   Second, fear can cloud moral intuition, particularly when we perceive that our livelihoods or our families’ finances are at stake. So can many other emotions or circumstances that we might or might not perceive.  Perhaps most important, our initial impressions of what to do may be mistaken.  Some decisions are inherently tough calls, that require careful consideration well beyond gut feel.

 

On the other hand, we can often trust our intuitions as initial indicators of a potential problem. We may have very good gut feel for identifying when obligations or commitments are potentially in conflict, for example. We may know when something might be wrong, or when something is profoundly, inexorably, undeniably wrong. However, different people have different sensitivities, different thresholds of concern, and different priorities. Individual moral intuitions are sure to vary. So, even under the best of circumstances, our ethical judgments can’t be based on gut feel alone.

 

Analysis has its limitations as well. We come to work with different values and moral orientations. Of course, having a strong, shared set of organizational values helps provide a good framework for discussion.  It is a critical, perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient condition for ethical deliberation within an organization. Even with a common framework for discussion, too many people who are very adept at business analysis are unwilling or unable to engage in ethical analysis. Agreeing on common premises then arguing through their implications to a common conclusion is challenging, and like any skill it takes practice. A good first step is recognizing that ethical deliberation and analysis do in fact require skill and practice. 

 

By the same token, it is very often gut feel or intuition that alerts us to a potential problem. We ignore those intuitions only at our peril. In fact, leaders should create environments where people are encouraged to speak up when they perceive a problem, and where there are processes for examining and evaluating those perceptions.

 

There is no single answer, no easy resolution to the tension between moral intuition and ethical reasoning or analysis. Instead, we can avoid the problems associated with that tension first by understanding the power and limits of our intuition, and then by developing skills and language that enable us to communicate and evaluate ethical concerns as capably as we are able to analyze business opportunities. Finally, we need to continue to develop shared values frameworks and skills for ethical deliberation within our organizations.

 

These are ongoing processes, which I intend to explore further over time. Right now, however, I’m quite certain that eInsight.org won’t redesign itself.  Thanks, as always, for spending the time with me.