Instinct-Do you trust it?

Instinct is the most powerful tool a leader has. Without it, he is at the mercy of the analysts, the staff recommendations, and the business metrics. Not that these are unimportant because they are important. However, given the same information, different managers, different leaders if you will, will arrive at different conclusions. The differential assumption is instinct. One manager’s instinct versus another manager’s instinct.

In sports, announcers have said, “Joe has a nose for the goal” or “Michael Jordan has a feeling for the basket.” This is another way of recognizing the instinct of the player. Your instinct takes on information from far more sources than just the metrics of a business analysis. It pulls information from magazines, from good decisions, from bad decisions, and places them in a database, which is called up when an important decision is made and the leader says, “I know what the numbers say, but my instinct tells me that we need to go in a slightly different direction.” It was this same instinct that caused the president of Hewlett Packard to launch the HP 400 calculator when every market study said no one would pay $200 for a calculator. In the first year, this product was a record-setting several hundred million dollar product for Hewlett Packard.

It was this same instinct that caused the president of Sony to make a decision contrary to all of Sony’s market research regarding the Sony Walkman. The market research clearly predicted that no one would pay $100 for a small radio to carry with them. Of course, the Sony Walkman and the millions of other pocket radios that have been sold clearly showed the market research to be incorrect.

Instinct is an awesome tool. Have you ever watched an expert fly fisherman? The eyes, ears, and nose are all raking in volumes of information about the environment. The result is a carefully controlled, instinctive cast into an area where the fisherman feels the fish should be. Of course, it is based on logic. Of course it is based on experience. But is also based on this information globule that exists in the back of the head that contains the aggregate of all information collected by this fisherman - this leader who is involved in a strategic decision-making situation. Then he uses this aggregate of information to instinctively select a place to fish, or a decision to make.

Management by the numbers or by the metrics is an idealistic business school view of decision making. A real understanding of decision making is understanding the instincts of a leader. Military commanders know this better than anyone else. The books about General Patton are full of the tremendous intelligence gathering capability of the American military. Patton, on the other hand, worked diligently at understanding the instincts of his opponent, the instincts of the commanders of the German army. He was a believer that if he could understand the instincts of the opposition commanders, then he would be in a much better position to use his own instincts to develop a strategy for victory.

A wonderful question for leaders is, What decisions do you make instinctively, and what decisions do you make by the numbers alone? Most companies “ROI” the financial department to death. Every project, every conceivable investment has to be met with an equivalent, unambiguous return on investment calculation. The arithmetic is the easy part. But the assumptions of the calculations are subjective. And many are instinctive. And of course these are the controlling parameters in the arithmetic process. Managers or staff analysts usually determine the arithmetic handling of a set of numbers. The analysts make the division. The leaders determine instinctively what numbers to divide.

Although this may seem an over simplification, it is not. My instincts tell me this is precisely what happens in real organizational environments. In golf, the metaphor would be something like this: the distance and the environment dictate the use of a six iron for this shot. But my instincts tell me a five iron is the right club. The leaders who go against their instincts, who make decisions contrary to their instincts, are almost always met with a bad shot. A leader’s instincts may not always result in the best end occurrence. But it always allows the implementation to proceed more smoothly, increase the probabilities of all the other steps surrounding the implementation of a decision will be made in an environment of confidence, which is always created by the following of our instincts.