‘Intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.’ Albert Einstein

We use our intuition all the time to take complex decisions in our jobs. We need to because we seldom have access to all the facts or the time to analyse them. In my next three articles I look at how intuition works, how it can mislead us, and what we can do to improve the quality of our intuitive judgments.

Intuition is unconscious pattern-recognition

Let me start with a simple example of professional intuition at work drawn from my own experience……

When I started working in Whitehall, I dealt with issues raised by constituents with their MPs who had written to the Minister asking for help. Because they related to circumstances in the real world they didn’t fall into neat categories reflecting legislation or Departmental responsibilities, but were often long stories involving a tangled mix of grievances and problems. You had to impose a structure on them: to decide what the key elements of the issues really were; whether the Government could do anything about it; if not why not – was it an area in which we should have a policy?; and if we could help, who in the huge bureaucratic machine of Central Government was best able to do so?

I would frequently wrestle fruitlessly with one of these cases, trying to see its shape. Eventually, after many cups of coffee, I would admit defeat, go next door and take it to my boss. Susan would look up slightly wearily from what she was doing. Then she would read the papers in what seemed to me a fairly cursory way, stare out of the window for thirty seconds, and say something like, ‘This is the key point, and I think the answer probably lies here. Check these two points, talk to the people in x Division and come back and tell me what they say. If they don’t agree, then we’ll have to think again’

Susan’s ability quickly to size up the problem, put her finger on the nub of it, and suggest the likely solution seemed to me like magic. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever be able to do the same (though, in due course, I’m pleased to say, I could). She was using her professional intuition: drawing on her experience of problems which might seem very different on the surface but whose deep features were similar: generic models and problem-solution pairs, stored away in her unconscious mind. And she was doing it in that moment of abstraction without the effort of thinking things through. She was also testing out her unconscious hypothesis - or asking me to do so – by consciously validating it against the facts and the opinions of colleagues.

Susan’s facility with untangling constituents’ problems provides a trivial example of the power of intuition which is capable of guiding us through much more complex issues. We couldn’t negotiate our personal or our working lives without this ability to apply all our experience simultaneously to the situation which confronts us. The problem is that, as with all the products of our powerful unconscious minds, the wrong intuition can give us exactly the same warm sense of certainty as the right one; and that is where our conscious minds come in. We need to use the two in tandem.

Two minds: The Visionary and the Engineer

Our two intelligences operate in completely different ways. Our unconscious minds work holistically. They’re always ‘on’. They make instant, effortless predictions of what will happen next by means of pattern matching and cue us to respond appropriately. Because of their apparently magical ability to see into the future, I think of them as Visionaries. Our conscious minds are rational and analytical. We deliberately apply them to a problem, and they take it apart, label the components using words and numbers and reach a conclusion by means of logic. Because they dismantle and reassemble issues, I describe them as Engineers.

The classical model of decision-making assumes that we take an engineering approach: that we identify and quantify our objective, set out the various ways in which we might achieve it, and consider the costs and benefits of the various options before choosing the best one. Certain tasks require just this approach: the engineers threading the Elizabeth Line tunnel through the complex infrastructure under London, for example, will have amassed huge amounts of data on geology and other services and speeds and routes, before going through this process countless times to make every decision. You do it on a much smaller scale when you do your annual or monthly budget. Facts and evidence, rationality and logic, rule.

To solve other problems, like choosing your life partner or your new home, the Visionary takes centre stage. A checklist of desirable features will only get you so far, as anybody who has used an internet dating site will know. The key thing is how you react instinctively to a particular person or place. You need to draw on the sum of your experience – particularly your emotional experience - to know what is right for you.

In many of the complex cases with which we deal in our working lives we need to use both Visionary and Engineer – unconscious intuition and conscious analysis - to make the right call. You may, for instance, have to design a marketing strategy for a product, specify the measures necessary to curb an epidemic, decide whether a complicated legal action is likely to succeed, or make a medical diagnosis and a plan for treatment. You only have a very vague and general objective – eg cure the patient – and have to start by structuring the problem, sifting its key elements from the information you have available to you. That information is invariably incomplete: to find a workable solution you may have to imagine how the future will pan out, particularly how people will react to a particular intervention.

You also have to solve the problem within a realistic timescale, so you don’t have the scope to commission new research. You have to draw on your accumulated experience of situations which have factors in common with the one you’re dealing with, particularly your experience of how people behave. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, calls this ability to make judgements based on the sum of past practical experience, ‘Phronesis’, often translated as ‘practical wisdom’. He contrasts it with ‘Techne’, theoretical knowledge or skill, which you also need, but which is a separate thing.

Using the Visionary and the Engineer together: the 'dual process'

Fortunately, our two forms of intelligence – conscious and unconscious - have complementary skills, and to solve problems we use them in what the psychologist Graham Wallas called the ‘dual process’. Wallas was thinking primarily about creativity, but his model applies equally to intuitive judgment. The dual process is the key to scientific method – formulate a hypothesis and then test it – and indeed the foundation of all human progress: it’s no good having an idea if you haven’t tested whether it’s a good one and haven’t done the detailed practical planning necessary to deliver it in the real world.

Simply put, Wallas’s dual process goes as follows: drawing on our prior experience, we formulate the problem consciously, allow our unconscious minds to generate a hypothesis about its solution, and then consciously check that hypothesis against the facts and imagine how it would play out in reality. We do this all the time, automatically. Studies of decision-making in real situations have shown that this is indeed how people under extreme pressure – for example, firefighters, military commanders, pilots - operate. Take the example of Chelsey ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who famously glided that large passenger plane onto the Hudson River, three minutes after it had lost all power in a bird strike over New York City, saving the lives of all on board (an example I owe to Professor Eugene Sadler-Smith). The incident was so dramatic and striking that it became the subject of a feature film, Sully, Miracle on the Hudson, starring Tom Hanks. Sully simply didn’t have time to work out what to do: consciously to trawl through his knowledge and training and evaluate the options. To land the plane, he had to act instantly, and rely heavily on his intuition. Everything he needed was stored away in his unconscious mind – distances to alternative airports, the speeds and trajectories which would allow the aircraft to glide to a landing. You can hear him on the cockpit recorder checking out his hypotheses. He asks for permission to land at a nearby airport, but immediately contradicts himself ‘We can’t do it’. His unconscious mind produces the only alternative solution: ‘We’re gonna be in the Hudson’.

Most of us, fortunately, don’t have to make such split-second judgments. I wanted to explore how professionals make complex decisions in less pressurised situations, so I interviewed a senior commercial lawyer, James, about how he decides whether a complex legal action is likely to succeed. After a long legal career James is currently working as a consultant, a senior reviewer for a fund which supports cases in return for a proportion of the damages if they win. His job is to judge whether a case is likely to succeed.

He goes through the dual process many times when reviewing a case. He will often have a strong gut feeling about it after a first reading of the papers (typically, five lever arch files of them). But then he has to work carefully through, establishing the facts as far as he can – he only has one side of the story – and considering the application of the law. His intuition comes into play even through this conscious analytical phase. He draws on his experience of human behaviour in general, similar cases, and court proceedings: is this how people behave in the real world?; is the client telling the truth?; how would this evidence strike a judge? He reports that his conscious mind doesn’t always have the final say. He is very experienced and he knows his intuition is reliable. If the conclusion he reaches through conscious analysis is at odds with his gut, he seeks further clarification and worries at the problem until the two are aligned.

Gut feeling

So what is gut feeling, that emotional, visceral sense we get about where the solution does and doesn’t lie? The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests the explanation for this is that all our unconscious models carry emotional tags, even those not overtly associated with personal matters. He calls this his ‘somatic marker hypothesis’.

In the minds of experienced professionals, Damasio proposes, models of situations and responses – problem and solution pairs – carry a positive emotional tag if they have led to a good outcome and a negative one if they have led to a bad outcome or a blind alley. Our models are generic: they extract the essence of problems which may appear quite different on the surface but have deep similarities. This emotional rudder – gut feeling – enables experts to select the more promising options from the infinitely large range of choices available to them as they work their way through a complex problem.

Damasio’s colleague, Antoine Bechara, provided support for the somatic marker hypothesis by carrying out an experiment that became known as the Iowa Gambling Task. In this experiment the subjects are asked to choose from four decks of cards which provide varying levels of reward and loss through winning and losing play money. Two of the decks provide low reward but also low level of loss; choosing consistently from these ‘advantageous’ decks eventually leads to a net gain of money. The other two decks provide a high reward but also a high punishment; choosing consistently from these ‘disadvantageous’ decks leads to a net loss of money.

Bechara found that the participants gradually learned the underlying rule that it was better to choose from the ‘advantageous’ decks. Moreover, when the experimenters measured their skin conductance they found that, long before they were explicitly conscious of the rule, the subjects were experiencing an unconscious negative reaction – a gut feeling - to choosing from the ‘disadvantageous’ decks.

The thing about the Iowa Gambling Task is that the participants received unequivocal feedback about their choices. It became clear to them from the outcome over time, first at unconscious and then at conscious level, that it was better to go for the low reward/low punishment option. Their gut feelings arose directly from experience; intuition and rationality were in lock step.

Of course, real life isn’t like this. The decisions we have to make are more complicated, there are many more factors in play including external ones, and it’s often impossible to disentangle the effect of our decision from other influences which are outside our control. Nor do most of us reflect on whether we made the right decision; it’s uncomfortable to think we might have been wrong; we’d rather go on to the next thing; and we’re adept at rationalising away any contradictions. But your intuitions will only be reliable if your stored unconscious pattern library accurately reflects reality. So it's worth revisiting problems to determine where your intuitive take was right, where it was wrong, and why. This fine-tuning takes place all the time at unconscious level but you can accelerate it by adopting the discipline of conscious reflection. I'll say more about this in the third article of this series, on practical steps to improve your judgment.

In my next article, I will look at some of the most common traps we can fall into.

Wallas, G, ‘The Art of Thought’, Solis Press 2014, Chapter IV
Sadler-Smith, E, ‘Inside Intuition’ Routledge, 2008, ‘The Intuitive Mind’, Wiley, 2010, and his other works on intuition
Damasio, A, ‘Descartes’ Error’, Vintage 2006
Klein, G, ‘Seeing What Others Don’t’, Nicholas Brearley Publishing 2014
Cohen-Hatton, S, ‘The Heat of the Moment’, Penguin Random House, 2019
Naqui, Shiv, and Bechara, ‘The Role of Emotion in Decision-Making’, Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 15, No 5, Association for Psychological Science, 2006

CBS Interview with Sullenberger, 7 March 2019 https://www.historyvshollywood.com/video/captain-sully-interview/

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In this article I want to show how the behaviour and actions of ex-President Trump, both in and out of office, graphically illustrate the power of the unconscious mind to misdirect us, sometimes disastrously. Trump provides a text-book demonstration of the dark side of the unconscious mind and the havoc it can wreak - as do other ‘populist’ politicians whose talent is to manipulate the emotions of the Electorate, and to trade on people’s fears and desires regardless of reality.

The Trump era is associated with ‘alternative facts’, ‘post truth’ and conspiracy theories. He is the first President ever to face criminal charges - there are currently more than ninety counts against him in four indictments ranging from fraud and purloining classified documents, to conspiracy to overturn the result of the 2020 election. His handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was characterised by macho posturing and denial.

To understand how this could have happened, we need first to explore in more depth the workings of the unconscious mind. Our intuitions and emotions operate in a completely different way from the conscious, rational, thinking minds we inhabit. We apply our conscious minds to an issue. They take things apart, crunch evidence and facts, apply language and numbers and logic. But our unconscious intelligences don’t do any of this – they work holistically, instantly and effortlessly, on the basis of impressions and emotions rather than facts and evidence.

To understand them, we need to go back to our evolutionary origins. Our brains evolved in stages. The emotional – limbic – brain came first; the cognitive, cerebral cortex came afterwards. To survive our distant ancestors needed quickly to recognise opportunities and threats - food and danger – and to react appropriately – ‘approach’ or ‘avoid’. The people who survived to procreate were those whose minds were good at extracting the salient features from situations they encountered, storing them away and recognising similar patterns when they encountered them again: those who recognised instantly that the shadow in the bushes might be a predator, and ran for their lives.

Our unconscious minds still do this. They continue to bridge the gap between an infinitely complex world and the finite processing capacity of our brains by storing simplified models of what we encounter, and looking for matching patterns in our current experience. We don’t live in the real world, but in a simulated world constructed by our unconscious minds. The function of our simulations is to predict what will come next and cue us to react appropriately, which they do by means of intuitions and emotions.

Your personal simulated reality is very sophisticated. It works at all levels of your experience. It captures the essence of the physical world through which you move every day – you know a chair is a chair even when it’s stacked upside down - and your cognitive world of concepts, ideas and problems – you can recognise similarities between superficially different situations. It even reduces your emotional experiences to their essence – particularly the formative events of your childhood – and determines your emotional reactions, in the light of what worked when you were a child. Its networks of models enable you to navigate an infinitely complex reality. It can apply all your experience simultaneously to solve a problem. It can reorganise itself to accommodate new information. It can find a way through complexities your conscious mind simply doesn’t have the processing power to grapple with. It’s helped in this by the emotional charge on its models. When the problem you face has key features in common with something you have encountered and dealt with before, it leads you to the positively charged solution which worked in the past and steers you away from blind alleys. You feel subtle bodily sensations: this feels wrong, but this feels right. I can’t explain why, but I’m certain this won’t work, but that will.

Occasionally you catch a glimpse of it working behind the scenes – when you have a hunch, a sudden insight, or an unexpected emotional reaction. The neuroscientist and therapist Professor Louis Cozolino uses the analogy of a computer operating system. Most of the time, all the continuously scrolling code is hidden from your conscious self; and you are totally unable to imagine what life would be like if you had a different system.

So, your unconscious mind is capable of magic. It’s the originator of the intuitions that guide you instantly to the answer, and the source of new insights and ideas. It’s the seat of the emotions which give you your passions and impel you to follow them, and the means by which you see into and influence other minds. It is hugely influential in your decisions and choices, how you interact with other people, and how you see yourself.

But things can go badly wrong. Most of the time your unconscious guide works well and your feelings and intuitions are reliable. But not always. One of its most striking features is that it is invariably convincing - so it may seriously mislead you without your having any idea that anything’s amiss.

There are a host of ways in which it can lead you astray and undermine your rational engagement with reality. Daniel Kahneman’s masterwork, Thinking Fast and Slow, comprehensively documents how these shortcuts (‘heuristics’) and biases work at cognitive level. The models on which it depends may be distorted or incomplete, so that its pattern matching is unreliable. It’s prone to jumping to conclusions and assembling the available evidence into a coherent story, missing crucial elements. It can’t comprehend the chaos and randomness of reality – it can’t handle concepts like risk and probability which are the products of later, conscious analysis – so it puts human agency – heroes and villains - at the centre of its stories and vastly overstates their, and indeed your, influence on events.

Its operation is bound up with your emotions. It sees the world through rose tinted spectacles and is prone to wishful thinking: we have a species bias towards over-optimism, which may have evolved to protect us from depression and inertia because we know we’re mortal. We are prone to various forms of denial to protect ourselves from overwhelming negative emotions. Perhaps Its most malign effects relate to our deep emotional models of ourselves. If we have experienced adversity during childhood, these may be seriously distorted: we may be insecure, have low self-esteem, make wrong choices and behave in dysfunctional ways.

How does all this explain Trump’s behaviour? His catastrophic refusal to grapple with an unwelcome reality was clearly manifest in his handling of the Covid epidemic. The rational response was to adopt the precautionary principle and plan for the worst; indeed, this strategy could have minimised both the death toll and economic damage. But Trump went with his unconscious promptings. He was concerned that the pandemic would threaten the economy and, more importantly, jeopardise his chances of re-election; he couldn’t countenance this psychologically; so he went into denial, at first suggesting that it was a ‘hoax’, invented by his political opponents, and subsequently that it would just ‘go away’. He refused to instruct state governors to lock down, or to enforce mask wearing (indeed it became a mark of honour for Republicans not to wear masks) and held large election rallies without social distancing – at one of which he himself caught the virus.

His denial contributed to a death toll of 450,000 people by the time he left office, the highest in any developed country, and a figure which, it has been suggested, could have been reduced by 40%, if the Federal Government had provided leadership. (The current inquiry into the UK Government’s response to Covid is of course finding similar deficiencies in preparation for and handling of the pandemic – also the result of the unconscious biases and dysfunctional culture of our authorities – to which I will return.)

The desperate need to protect himself from having to face unpalatable truths is also at the core of Trump’s inability to accept that he had lost the 2020 Election, his insistence that it had been ‘stolen’ from him, and the complex conspiracy he led to overturn the result. Indeed it is fundamental to his personality.

Trump presents as a sufferer from full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Narcissists appear superficially very confident, but in reality have very low self esteem. They have sought to bury distorted, negative models of themselves acquired in childhood deep in their unconscious by inventing the myth that they are uniquely talented and entitled. They can’t risk the explosion of this myth because it defends them against emotions they can’t bear – the sense of their imperfection and fragility. Trump demonstrates many of the behaviours associated with NPD: he makes grandiose statements about his abilities (he is, apparently, ‘a very stable genius’), is famously thin-skinned (fights back when criticised), lacks empathy (he referred to the Covid death toll as ‘a shame’) and is a habitual liar (his view of himself is, after all, based on a lie).

Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, has suggested that as a result of his own insecurities – these distortions often come down the generations – Trump’s father instilled in his son the unconscious conviction that he must be a ‘winner’, and that it was shameful to be a loser (loser is of course one of Trump’s favourite insults to others). Shame acquired in childhood is a very powerful determinant of adult personality and behaviour: people will go to any lengths to avoid confronting the devastating sense of worthlessness at their core. Trump cannot admit to himself that he is ‘a loser’ without doing this.

The lawyers are currently considering whether it is vital to the charge of conspiracy that Trump really knew he had lost the Election. Our unconscious minds seem to be able to plunge us into states of simultaneously knowing and not knowing what’s really going on. Trump told the reporter, Bob Woodward, that he had known from the beginning how serious Covid would be. Justification after the fact, or was he aware at some level that he was deceiving himself when he refused to take the pandemic seriously?

Trump is a frightening example of the power of an unchecked unconscious to wreak chaos. He has an uncanny ability to tune into the desires of a certain section of the US Electorate, who believe themselves victimised and neglected – the fantasy of an all-powerful heroic leader, who understands them and will ‘make America great again’- and ride on the populist wave which feeds his own narcissism. Sadly, there is the real possibility that this pattern could be repeated soon. He has already put forward a frightening manifesto for his second term, much of it driven by his narcissistic compulsion to grab power for himself, and revenge himself on those who have criticised him or held him in check in the past.

In my next article I will look at the relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds – in particular in how we make judgments in complexity and whether we can trust our intuitions. I will come back to the emotional distortions from which most of us suffer to some degree, and to the importance of organisational culture, in later articles.

Sources
Cozolino, Louis Why Therapy Works: Using our Minds to Change our Brains, W W Norton and Company Inc, 2016
Kahneman, Daniel Thinking Fast and Slow, Allen Lane, 2011
Trump, Mary, Too Much and Never Enough, Simon & Schuster, 2020
Woodward, Bob, Rage, Simon & Schuster, 2020

We believe we’re rational beings. We identify with our conscious - thinking - minds. They’re where we locate our ‘selves’. But, actually, our unconscious minds – our intuitions and emotions - are in charge. The psychologist, Jonathan Haidt has compared the relationship between our two minds to that of an elephant and a rider. The rider – the conscious mind – thinks he is directing the elephant. But the elephant – the unconscious mind - is much stronger and more powerful. If the elephant wants to go in a different direction, the elephant will always win.

This is just as true at work as it is in our personal lives; and it has inspired me to spend the last few years reading and thinking about the role of the unconscious mind in our working lives. It came to me, one day – in the way that new insights arrive in the conscious mind after much hidden, unconscious reorganisation – that many of the challenges I had wrestled with in my first career as a senior civil servant and which my coaching clients now brought to me had unconscious processes at their core. So, I thought it would be useful to produce some practical guidance to managing and getting the best from our unconscious selves and those of our colleagues in the workplace.

The workplace presents us with a fiendish mix of cognitive and emotional demands: making judgements, solving problems, engaging our teams, persuading our colleagues, finding work which fulfils us, and, sometimes, dealing with very powerful feelings. For example:

• We rarely have access to all the information we need to make a complex decision or the time we would need to analyse it properly; indeed many decisions require us to predict the future, how people will react to a particular intervention. To make judgements in these circumstances we have to use our intuition. But how do these gut feelings work? And how do we know whether we can trust them?
• Where do new ideas come from? The knowledge economy requires constant innovation. There can be no personal growth without insight. How do I stimulate and nurture the creative process in myself and in my team? This is of course particularly relevant to you if you work, as many of my coaching clients do, in the creative industries.
• When I’m absolutely convinced I have the right solution, why is it so difficult to persuade my colleagues even with the evidence and arguments to back it up? How can I work more effectively with people who seem to think in an entirely different way from me?
• How can I inspire and motivate my team to perform better?
• I’m not happy or satisfied in my current role. How did I get here? How can I find what I really want to do?
• Why am I a workoholic? Why do I get so upset at work? Why is my boss so difficult? And why are the people I work with so sensitive to criticism?

And, most importantly, what can I do about any or all of these problems?

Some of these issues require the magical powers of the unconscious mind: the way intuition can enable us to find our way through a forest of options and somehow put our finger on the one which will work; how new ideas and insights arrive, as if from nowhere, when we’re in the shower or out for a walk; why a project has particular meaning for us and we feel passionately committed to it; when the enthusiasm of a colleague ‘rubs off’ on us; and how we find we can somehow tap into the emotions of our team and motivate and inspire them.

But others relate to the unconscious mind’s powers of misdirection. Intuition can play us false: we follow our gut but the solution it leads us to doesn’t work - we’ve jumped to conclusions. We don’t fully understand ourselves and what matters to us and make wrong choices – and perhaps find ourselves in a career which doesn’t fulfil us. We find a colleague impossible to deal with for reasons we just can’t understand. Or we find setbacks trigger strong feelings in us, which at some level we know are disproportionate but we find hard to manage; we become so bound up in our emotions that we have little energy left for the job.

We see these phenomena not only in our own working lives, but all around us. The dark sides of the unconscious mind – irrationality, a refusal to acknowledge and deal with reality as it is, distorted emotions and values – have been much in evidence in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We’ve seen psychologically damaged leaders driven by an apparently irresistible personal compulsion for power and status and uninterested in the public good; a growing preference, fed by social media, for ‘alternative’ facts and conspiracy theories, stories which tell us what we want to hear, so we don’t need to grapple with unpalatable reality; and misguided decisions, which should have been taken on rational grounds after careful evaluation of the facts, but instead are made by policy-makers in thrall to a host of ideological and cognitive biases.

We’re familiar with how our conscious minds work - by means of rational, logical analysis. But our unconscious minds operate in a completely different way by constructing simplified representations of reality and looking for matching patterns. The first step in unlocking your magical unconscious powers and avoiding their misleading promptings is to understand this difference. So in this series of articles I will put forward a simple model to explain how this instant pattern-matching ability enables us to solve problems and understand and influence other people, but also how it can go badly wrong and lead us into faulty judgments, wrong choices and, indeed, personal unhappiness.

Just as I do when coaching, I will draw on theories and research from cognitive and personality psychology, management and leadership theory, neuroscience and psychotherapy, and case studies from my own experience, my coaching practice and the wider world, and try to extract the gist. Most importantly, I will attempt to formulate practical lessons for use in our working lives.

Our unconscious minds all construe our worlds in different ways, depending on our background and experience – that’s why it’s always illuminating to share perspectives. So, I’d be fascinated to hear what you think; and please share these articles with others in your network who you think will be interested. If you are an academic or a coach, does the necessarily simplified material give an adequate account of our current state of knowledge and would it be helpful to your clients? If you are a hard-pressed leader or creative, is it illuminating and useful in your professional life?

Sources
Haidt, Jonathan The Happiness Hypothesis – Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science, William Heineman, 2006