How intuition can improve decision making
In high pressure situations traditional decision-making methods like deductive reasoning or probability analysis just don’t work. We simply don’t have the time to evaluate every option. Instead we rely on intuition.
While it might feel like guesswork, it’s our brain's way of rapidly processing environmental cues and making predictions based on prior experiences.
Intuition isn’t random, it’s learned, productive and based on unconscious information.
But how can you develop better intuition without waiting years to gain experience?
Here are three ways to speed up the process:
Diversify your experience: take on a wide variety of projects to build a broader experience base.
Review challenging projects: sit down with experts to identify critical cues and decision making patterns. Sharing these stories with others to point out what factors led to key decisions will help them improve their intuitive decision making.
Simulate real-life scenarios: training simulations that allow you to practise sizing up situations quickly can help you to see what's really going on. They are particularly useful because you can run them multiple times speeds up learning.
An example of this type of training is business wargaming. I’ve used it to help organisations simulate competitive scenarios before launching a new product or implementing a change in strategy.
Intuition isn’t mysterious, it’s a skill you can develop by expanding your experiences and sharpening your pattern-recognition abilities.