Ah, it is as old as the chicken-and-egg debate: when is intuition your best guide and when should data drive your decisions?
Enterprise 2.0 guru and Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management Andrew McAfee recently weighed in recently on the Harvard Business Review blog:
“Human intuition can be astonishingly good, especially after it’s improved by experience. Savvy poker players are so good at reading their opponents’ cards and bluffs that they seem to have x-ray vision. Firefighters can, under extreme duress, anticipate how flames will spread through a building. And nurses in neonatal ICUs can tell if a baby has a dangerous infection even before blood test results come back from the lab,” he says at www.hbr.org.
However, McAfee concludes that we should rely less, not more, on intuition:
“My conclusion from all of this research and much more I’ve looked at is that intuition is similar to what I think of Tom Cruise’s acting ability: real, but vastly overrated and deployed far too often.”
You can imagine that we, too, are big fans of evidence-based decisions though we also freely admit that there are times that intuition can be quite valuable. In an emergency, for example, where you don’t have access to the relevant data or the time to review it, your gut can be a valuable guide — if you have honed your intuition through previous experience and study. An example we’ve heard used often is the silverback gorilla. The silverback is the dominant male in a gorilla troop and determines how that troop responds to a threat — whether it disperses in flight or gathers together to create an imposing threat response to an enemy. If the threat comes from another animal, that clustering may prove to be quite a deterrent. However if the threat is a human poacher packing an automatic rifle, that clustering only makes the slaughter easier. The first choice would indicate that intuition works and the latter… Well, you get it.
However the instances where intuition trumps data are quite rare. McAfee states that, “statistically-based algorithms have demonstrated at least a 17 percent advantage over the judgments of human experts.” And gorillas too, we assume.
“A 2000 paper surveyed 136 studies in which human judgment was compared to algorithmic prediction. Sixty-five of the studies found no real difference between the two, and 63 found that the equation performed significantly better than the person. Only eight of the studies found that people were significantly better predictors of the task at hand. If you’re keeping score, that’s just under a 6% win rate for the people and their intuition, and a 46% rate of clear losses.”
We must point out that algorithms and other technology-based decision support tools are also not infallible (need we mention the role they played in the sub-prime mortgage crisis). I believe that the wisest decision makers rely neither on data or intuition exclusively but rather use all of the tools at their disposal to “pressure test” the decisions as they are about to make them. In essence, unlike the title of a Tom Cruise film, they make them with their eyes wide open.
What do you think? Be sure to check out McAfee’s full post — it’s a good read — and let us know how you balance intuition and evidence.
