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Hunches tell you where to look
In business, the defensibility of a decision can matter more to a career than the quality of its outcome, which means intuition gets ruled out. That is like telling a detective to use only evidence, with no gossip, anecdote, hunch, or sense of smell.
A detective might ask an open question: did anybody notice anything unusual last night between eight and ten? Someone says a weird man drove past in a white van. That has no evidential value, but it shows what to investigate next.
If every business decision has to rest on stepping stones of pre-existing data and logic, a company can reach only about five of the possible 25 places where a solution might be found. Its closest competitors, using the same stepping stones, already occupy those places.
How do detectives reason from a hunch?
The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called this reasoning abduction in the late 1800s. It starts from an observation and proposes the explanation that would best account for it, which can then be tested. A hunch about a white van is a hypothesis to investigate and not a conclusion.
When is expert intuition reliable?
In a 2009 paper in American Psychologist, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein concluded that intuition is trustworthy when the environment has regular patterns and the person gets quick, clear feedback. Chess and firefighting meet those conditions. Long-range forecasting in unpredictable fields does not.
Why do managers prefer defensible choices?
The psychologist Philip Tetlock studied accountability in experiments through the 1980s and 1990s. He found that when people expect to justify a decision to an audience, they often favor the option that is easiest to defend. A choice backed by documented data is simple to justify afterward, whatever its outcome.