‘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/