Gary A. Klein Quotes
You need to take your gut feeling as an important data point, but then you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it, to see if it makes sense in this context.
I worry about leaders in complex situations who don't have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.
There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.
People sometimes are so confident in their flawed beliefs that they get stuck - fixated - and as a result are blinded to insights that are right in front of them.
By the time executives get to high levels, they are good at making others feel confident in their judgment, even if there's no strong basis for the judgment.
Slow adaptation is driven by forces such as evolution. Fast adaptation is driven by forces such as insight.
You need strategies that help rule things out. That's the opposite of saying, "This is what my gut is telling me; let me gather information to confirm it."
If a situation is very, very turbulent, it has low validity, and there's no basis for intuition.
Many business intuitions and expertise are going to be valuable; they are telling you something useful, and you want to take advantage of them.
Most corporate decisions aren't going to meet the test of high validity. But they're going to be way above the low-validity situations that we worry about.
If you mean, "My gut feeling is telling me this; therefore I can act on it and I don't have to worry," we say you should never trust your gut.
Society's epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, "Here's what I'm going to do" - and you follow him.
