Have you ever been in a difficult situation with unclear outcomes that made it tough to decide? And, despite the data pointing at one choice, you went with another because you followed your gut, which was exactly the right thing to do.

That’s the beauty of intuition; it helps us not only make the best decisions but actively avoid the bad ones too. I think we’ve all been in the situation when we haven’t listened to our intuition, and we then regret our rationalizations. We’ve hired the wrong person, accepted the wrong job, or invested in the wrong project, which meant spending time, effort, energy, and possibly money correcting a situation that our inner warning system had made clear all along.
 

Intuition helps us make the best choices and actively avoid some terrible ones. That matters. As leaders, you are recognized, promoted, and rewarded for the quality of your decisions. Which means that making the right choices is fundamental to your role and how far you’ll climb up the corporate ladder.

That intuition helps leadership is abundantly clear from the research:
 

• When questioned, 69 out of 70 CEOs confirmed intuition was important in their decision-making. That’s pretty much 99%.     
• 75% of C-suite executives say they rely on it.     
• 62% of leaders say they often use intuition when making decisions.     
• Nearly 50% of managers consider their gut feel to be very important.

Meaning, the more senior you are, the more you use and value your intuition.

But it’s not a unique skill available to the chosen few. One recent experiment showed that when executives were forced to use intuition to choose between two options, they were right 90% of the time. So, intuition works well, particularly in complex situations where data isn’t available or there’s way too much of it, and intuition improves with experience.

Yet there’s still the reality that intuition remains very much in the broom closet. A couple of years ago I did some informal research among 50 senior leaders about how they had made their last difficult decision; all of them said they had used their intuition, but none of them had talked about it. But I think it’s time to share what our intuition tells us and to start to truly recognize how it works. That way, we can leverage it and benefit from understanding other people’s intuitive operating models, because interestingly they aren’t all the same.

Yes, of course, intuition is gut and heart feel, but it can also be throat, feet, and head, so start noticing your whole somatic experience, to see what prompts you. Intuition is also often wrapped up in what you have energy and curiosity for, what catches your attention, or makes you pause and take a second glance. It’s also those quiet, recurring thoughts that come back to you time and again. And it’s in the synchronicities and serendipities that turn up often at meaningful junctures in our lives.

Sometimes intuition can be hard to discern, particularly when you are under stress or emotional pressure, which ironically are the moments when we truly want it. If you’re always on with no downtime between meetings and emails, it can be harder to access. Here’s what Matt Pyrecroft, polar explorer and filmmaker, said when I interviewed him:

“I work in extreme and hostile environments regularly where intuition is a huge part of what we do. Do we go left or right? Do we abseil down there or not? Does this system look safe? Of course, I’m going to check things, but really, I tend to know. And if I have a big decision to make, I do this thing I call the coin flip, where I don’t actually carry a coin, but I think to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve got to decide right now. Is it x or y?’ Then I flip the coin in my head, thinking, ‘What do I want it to land on? Is it heads or tails?’ I know while the coin is flipping in slow motion in the air, what I hope it lands on. And that tells me what my intuition says. I use that all the time to make decisions.”

Incubation is another excellent intuitive technique. Let’s say you’re torn between hiring person A and person B. You can write both options on separate sticky notes and pull one out. Do this a couple of times, interspersed with other tasks. Then sleep on it. Chances are you’ll wake up in the morning knowing what to do. And if you don’t, get advice. The best intuitions are verifiable but it’s fine to ask other people what they think, preferably without leading their thoughts.

Using intuition as a group exercise is another great leadership tool and team intuition is a new and quickly expanding area of research. It describes how teams reach decisions that they never would have arrived at working individually. When you’re involved in these discussions, which I often am, there’s a great sense of energy and often passion. Of course, this isn’t about abandoning the data; on the contrary, if you have difficult decisions to make, we know that the best outcomes are achieved through a mix of analysis and intuition and deliberately moving between the two. And if you’re the leader in the room, you always go last so you don’t influence what other people say.

The fact of the matter is that intuition gives you a great personal competitive advantage. When GenAI has become the new normal and we’re all using ChatGPT, DeepMind and similar tools, it’s the quality of your decision-making that makes you stand out in the crowd – and that will help propel you to the top.

Author Bio

Jessica Pryce-Jones, author of INTUITION AT WORK: Using Your Gut Feelings To Get Ahead, started her career in finance, where she learned about numbers, strategy and leadership. After ten years in the corporate world, she completed a psychology degree – she wanted to understand why some of her bosses were brilliant and others were dismal. Those insights launched a new career facilitating, coaching, designing interventions and writing. Pryce-Jones has also worked as adjunct faculty in leadership development at many business schools including Cambridge Judge, Cass, Cornell, Chicago Booth, Cranfield, London Business School, and Saïd (Oxford); she is a Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Coaching. Visit https://jessicapryce-jones.com/

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