"Trust Your Gut"
"Trust your gut."
Have you ever said or heard this before? If you've heard this, someone is telling you to trust your intuition. Some think intuition is magic or spiritual quickening, serving as the north star for future decisions. Sorry to disappoint, but intuition isn't magical or spiritual. It is another function of our complex and highly efficient brain. Intuition is something to leverage but not lean into when making decisions.
We don't want to "trust our gut" when making business decisions because intuition lacks rational reasoning. Intuition is our subconscious brain rapidly pairing the culmination of our life experiences with information from our long-term memory without us asking our brains to process information rationally.
It may not seem dangerous, but it can be. Allowing our intuition to make critical-to-mission decisions can potentially jeopardize your company. Why? Because our brains are wired with biases that can influence these hasty connections our brain is making. This doesn't mean we should disregard our intuition. Instead, we can use it to guide us toward activating our rational thought. If we feel strongly about something (good or bad), it's worth a second look. However, we must be cautious of framing biases within our reasoning. We can't allow our strong feelings to sway the way we interpret information. We must remain rational and rely on the facts.
For example, in 2007, Steve Ballmer gave his gut feeling when he said, "There's no chance that the iPhone will get any significant market share. No chance." If he had reasoned, he would have paid attention to the market, Apple's brand value positioning (think iPod), pending patents, and the quick adoption of the qwerty board around five years earlier. This quote remains a popular reminder of how people's intuition can miss the mark.
As decision-makers, we prefer to leave a legacy of greatness behind. As always, there are no guarantees in businesses. Some can tell you how they depend on their intuition, which never leads them wrong, while others wish they never listened to it or wished they had. We take calculated risks. We don't win them all, but we should be responsible for determining reasonable risk, and the litmus can't simply be a "gut feeling."
