‘Were there things we should have done differently? Unquestionably. But, you know, I would struggle to itemise them all before you now in a hierarchy, I’m afraid.’
Boris Johnson at the Covid Inquiry, 6 December 2023
As we saw in the first article of this series on decision-making, many problems require a classical approach: that we consciously gather all the facts and evidence and grind through them in a systematic way, setting out and evaluating the options, and often using sophisticated theoretical and analytical tools.
But many of the decisions we take at work are simply not susceptible to the classical approach. We often have to start by imposing a structure on a multi-faceted, ill-defined problem; we may not have access to all the necessary facts or the time to analyse them; or the relevant evidence simply may not exist, because it involves predicting the future – particularly how people will react to a certain intervention. Then we have to rely on our intuition, our ability to draw on our unconscious store of knowledge and experience, and to perceive deep generic similarities between the situation we currently face and problems we have solved in the past.
In Article 4, I touched on some of the ways in which our unconscious minds can systematically mislead us because of their tendency to jump to conclusions and the way in which they have evolved to protect us emotionally from the chaos of the world. You can find a fuller account of these ‘heuristics and biases’ in Daniel Kahneman’s masterwork, Thinking Fast and Slow, where he also suggests some measures to counter them.
In this third article in the series on decision-making, I want to provide advice on some other ways in which you can improve your intuitive judgment in practice.
1 Listen to your intuition and give it time to work
Our unconscious minds communicate with us by means of subtle emotional and physical feelings. Learn to recognise when yours is trying to get in touch with you, and what it’s telling you.
Often it is saying ‘something’s wrong here. Things are not developing according to my stored patterns. Engage your conscious mind and examine further’. I get this feeling very powerfully when an account of a situation or the answer to a problem doesn’t seem to ‘hang together’ (your unconscious mind works in such metaphors, which are about generic similarities). It’s a feeling of unease, almost frustration, and I know to trust it and interrogate the facts. Or, if the feeling is positive, the signal may mean that your unconscious has recognised a deep correspondence between the current situation and one you’ve encountered before, and is trying to guide you towards a solution which worked in the past.
Lab experiments have demonstrated this effect using simple word puzzles. If you show people a sentence with an incongruous ending – eg the apples were psychological - they immediately experience a jolt and engage their conscious minds to try and work out what it could possibly mean. If you ask people to find the link between three words and then show them linked words – eg salt, deep, foam (link sea) - they experience a positive feeling even before they’ve consciously realised what the link is: their gut is telling them that the triad is indeed linked.
To generate an intuitive hypothesis, your unconscious mind needs to spend some time sorting and matching and then send its most promising conclusions to your conscious mind. And it needs to do this without interference from conscious stimuli. This is why if you ‘sleep on’ a problem, the key issue and its probable solution often seems clearer in the morning. If you can’t see where the nub lies, or the problem just seems insoluble, leave it and do something else, and give your unconscious mind the time to do its work.
Think about an occasion when you had a strong intuition about something. How would you describe the feeling?
2 Train your intuition
Reflective practice
Intuition depends on pattern-recognition, and that will only be reliable if your unconscious library of models is comprehensive and your models are accurate representations of reality. This is a matter of experience, and indeed research shows that more experienced professionals – pilots and doctors, for example – are better at unconsciously sizing up a problem and identifying a possible solution than less experienced ones.
Much of the fine tuning of our models takes place unconsciously without our awareness. But you can accelerate the process if you consciously adopt the practice of reviewing past decisions to see whether your intuitions were right or wrong and, if wrong, why. This is reflective practice, and there is a wonderful – if fictional – example of it in one episode of the multi award-winning American TV series ‘The West Wing’.
Like real leaders, the fictional hero, President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, has to make complex judgment calls under pressure and where the result will be catastrophic if he’s wrong. Bartlet decides to intervene to support Taiwan in a stand-off with China about whether Taiwan should be allowed to test its defensive weapons. He resolves to send several aircraft carriers into the Taiwan strait, thus risking provoking a global war - as his advisers readily point out. After a tense few days China backs down as Bartlet felt sure they would. His young aide Sam wants to understand how he could have been so certain. In dialogue with Bartlet, he explores each of the assumptions the President made about how China would react to a series of threats and incentives put forward by the US. This is how reflective practice works: by retrospectively unpicking the intuitive element of each stage of the decision-making process and consciously reviewing it.
Real life is complex. There is often a lack of direct feedback about the soundness of individual decisions: there may be many influences on final outcomes and it’s very difficult to isolate and evaluate the effect of a single judgment. But you can still take measures to train your intuition by acquiring the habit of reflection: thinking about why things turned out as they did and adjusting your unconscious models accordingly.
Reflecting on your judgments requires a surprising amount of self-discipline. We’re all inclined to go on to the next pressing problem without pausing to consider whether we were right about the last one. It also requires a certain psychological robustness to admit to ourselves that we may have been wrong because it is both uncomfortable and a blow to our self-esteem. As we can see from Johnson’s reply to the Covid Inquiry, which I quoted at the beginning of this article, despite the huge amounts at stake, he didn’t seem to have thought it necessary to engage with this challenge.
Cultivate your powers of empathy
The British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, was forced to resign after 44 days in office in 2022. She was in thrall to economic doctrine and blind to the practical and human consequences of her decisions. She failed to communicate or take people with her. She lacked empathy.
Many judgments in complexity involve making assumptions about how people will react, and this ability to read them is a vital skill. We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the pointy-headed intellectual in their ivory tower, whose intuitions are invariably off beam because they aren’t grounded in an understanding of practical reality, and human nature in particular.
Empathy is a good in itself, crucial to getting people on side and brokering agreements, and a crucial component of good judgment. How much we have depends on both our genes and our childhood experiences, but we can grow our empathetic capacity – a point to which I will return in later articles.
Think of a decision you made recently. Was your intuition about the answer/solution right? Did things turn out how you believed they would? If not, where did you go wrong? Which of the assumptions you made were right and which were wrong and why? Were you right about how the people involved or affected would respond?
3 Check your intuitions
Be systematic: use checklists and algorithms
It can be very helpful to have checklists and algorithms to hand for checking your intuitive take on a problem. Many professions have them. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence, for example, provides a comprehensive set of diagnostic tools (called ‘clinical pathways’) for medical practitioners. These are based on evidence (research and expert judgment) and take the form of a huge edifice of interlocking decision trees to enable practitioners to identify and treat medical conditions. They are designed to be used as an adjunct, not a substitute, for the doctor’s professional judgment.
But checklists/algorithms don’t have to be as complex as this to be useful. The firefighter Sabrina Cohen-Hatton has a Doctorate in psychology. She was concerned that the guidance for incident commanders instructed them to use the classical model of decision-making - to identify and weigh up all the options for action. She knew that this just wasn’t feasible in emergencies, and she wanted to legitimise the use of intuition but also to improve it. She suggested a protocol asking commanders to pause and use their conscious minds to check that their intuitive conclusion is the right one before acting on it: in effect formalising the conscious verification stage of the dual process by asking: ‘what am I trying to achieve?; what do I expect to happen as a result of this decision?; and do the benefits outweigh the risks?’
I suggested two other approaches in Article 4: triangulation (gathering perspectives from a number of sources), and Gary Klein’s ‘pre-mortem’ (attempting to overcome our natural bias towards over-optimism). One of the simplest is of course to surface from the problem periodically and ask yourself, as Cohen Hatton proposes, ‘What is our objective? What are we actually trying to achieve here?’
But it’s also important to remember that intuition can do things which analysis can’t, and not get t0o wedded to your checklists. In my Whitehall career, I was frequently involved in interviewing candidates for important posts in Government bodies. We were always meticulous in analysing the qualities and skills needed to chair a particular organisation, and carefully evaluating each candidate against these criteria on the basis of their application and interview performance.
But this only took us so far. We often found at interview that a particular candidate was way ahead of the field. He or she scored similarly to the others on the criteria, but they had some other relevant quality or expertise that became obvious when meeting them. The criteria had missed some vital attribute, or the candidate in person had revelatory insights into the role which we hadn’t thought of, or simply an indefinable ‘star quality’ which it would have been very difficult to translate into the language of interview criteria. You need both intuition and analysis, guiding each other, to home in on the right solution.
Think of a problem you have to solve. Can you design a simple algorithm/checklist to make sure you don’t miss anything important?
Run the issue past your colleagues – particularly experienced ones
Other people have a different set of models of the world. If you look at a problem through their lenses as well as your own, you’re more likely to see it in 3D.
This is particularly true of your more experienced colleagues who have a richer library of patterns to draw on. There is a story that the great physicist Richard Feynman could look briefly at several pages of complex mathematical equations and conclude: ‘Looks about right’. He was a genius of course, but he was also steeped in his discipline and could instantly see the critical elements in the welter of formulae and whether they formed a coherent whole – a very advanced and abstract form of pattern recognition.
This may be an unfashionable suggestion, because we set such store by youth in our society, but your older colleagues can be an important resource. Sully was nearly 58 and had 40 years of flying experience behind him when he landed on the Hudson (see Article3). More experienced doctors make better clinical judgments. Many creative artists reach their pinnacle very late in their careers: Monet painted his last Waterlily paintings when he was in his eighties. We frequently encounter classical musicians, actors, academic experts, and indeed world statesmen, in their seventies and eighties. At the time of writing, the most popular television broadcaster on science in this country, Sir David Attenborough, is in his 90s.
Although other mental functions – working memory, the ability to focus, speed of processing – usually decline with age, there is evidence that our ability to see to the heart of problems goes on improving and remains undiminished. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg suggests that the networks which we use most often remain robust as we age, and ‘are resistant to brain decay.’ Their frequent use means that they are ‘firmly encoded’, they do not require much energy to use, and they occupy a lot of the physical space in our brains so survive despite the loss of other areas. Many of us retain, indeed improve on, our ability to extract the gist of an issue and see matching patterns well past conventional retirement age.
4 Know yourself. Are You a Visionary or an Engineer?
Some people have the ability to move between intuitive and analytical processing as the task requires. But lab research has shown that many of us have some degree of preference for one or the other: we are more comfortable with either intuitive or analytical approaches to problem-solving.
In Article 3, I introduced the term Visionary to refer to intuitive processing and Engineer to refer to analysis. Which are you? Do you see problems holistically and rely on inspiration to solve them? Or is your first instinct to get to grips with the facts and construct a series of logical propositions? I am a Visionary but was lucky to work closely for many years with a very able Engineer. A typical dialogue would go as follows:
Me: ‘I’ve had a brilliant idea about how to solve the problem. I think that, if we did the following…’
Him: ‘Hmm. Interesting. Let’s test it against what we know. I think there are three difficulties we need to think through…’
There are psychometric tests – in particular the Myers Briggs Type Indicator – which can help you analyse your preferences and those of your team members. You need to be aware where your and your colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses lie to construct a balanced and effective team, one with the dual process built in. I will be coming back to the issue of personality in a number of future articles.
Sources
Gary Klein, Seeing What Others Don’t, Nicholas Brearly Publishing, 2014
‘Hartsfield’s Landing’, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Vincent Misiano, ‘The West Wing’ Series 3, Episode 14, first broadcast on 27 February 2002 http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/wwscripts/3-14.php
Elkhonon Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox – How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older, Pocket Books 2007
Arthur S Elstein, Alan Schwarz, Clinical Problem Solving and Diagnostic Decision-Making; Selective Review of the Cognitive Literature, BMJ Vol 324, 23 March 2002
Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, The Heat of the Moment, Penguin Random House 2019
Nicholas Levy, Cindy Harmon-Jones, and Eddie Harmon Jones, University of New South Wales: Dissonance and Discomfort: Does a Simple Cognitive Inconsistency Evoke a Negative Affective State? Motivation Science 2018 Vol 4, No 2 95-108.
Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, University of Wuerzburg: The Architecture of Intuition: Fluency and Affect Determine Intuitive Judgements of Sematic and Visual Coherence and Judgements of Grammaticality in Artificial Grammar Learning, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 2009, Vol 138, No 1, 39 – 63
John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor – Creative Insights and the Brain, Windmill Books 2015, p66 et seq. The experimenters asked their subjects to solve word puzzles against the clock. These may be solved analytically, by systematically trying out different combinations, or intuitively, by waiting for the solution to pop into the conscious mind. They found that, though most people used both strategies, the subjects tended to prefer one or the other.