Intuition, experience must go hand-in-hand
We make mistakes in spite of checklists and procedures, and as Daniel Kahneman said, intuition is marvellous but flawed. We need both to keep us out of trouble. Psychologist Gary Klein, the author of Sources of Power and Intuition, says if you just follow procedures and are afraid to make mistakes, you may reduce your as well as an organisation’s effectiveness. “I’m afraid that the temptation to try to procedurise and checklist everything can get in the way of those kinds of insights and those kinds of social concerns that seem so important,” Klein said.
In order to learn how people make life-and-death decisions under extreme time pressure and uncertainty, Klein talked to firefighters.
The firefighter Klein talked to told him that he can’t think of a single decision he ever made. He said he just followed procedures. When Klein wanted to see the procedure manuals, he said, “It is not written down.” What Klein found was that the firefighter was not taking decisions in the classical sense. Before taking the decision, the firefighter did not generate a set of options, and then compared their pros and cons. Klein asked him a rephrased question. “How have you handled cases where you had struggled, cases where you might have made mistakes earlier in your career?”
The firefighter told Klein about a fire in a house. Since the smoke was coming from the back, the firefighter presumed it was probably a kitchen fire. He sent one of his crew inside the house to knock the fire out. Klein asked the fireman, why he sent a man inside the house when it is customary to go out of the house when a house is on fire? Why did he not break a window and use hoses to tame the fire? The fireman told him that he did not do it because if he did that, he would have pushed the fire back into the house, and, thus, allowed it to spread wider into the house. Obviously, one wouldn’t want to do that. The fireman also told him that an interior attack is not always possible because if there is another house right next to it, it could catch fire also. In such cases, the firefighting starts externally. Klein concludes, “That’s what 20 years of experience buys you. You build up all these patterns, you quickly size up situations, and you know what to do. Experts know what to ignore, and what they have to watch carefully. Experts know what to expect next, so they get ready for that.” Klein says these are intuitive decisions. By intuition he means the way we are able to use our experience. Intuition is not magic. Intuitions are based on experience. It allows us to “build a repertoire of patterns” that allows us to quickly frame situations, size situations up, and know what to do. It is not mere intuition, but intuition laced with mental simulation. Our mental simulation does the analysis. He calls such decision-making “recognition-primed decisions”. The decisions are primed by their ability to recognise situations balanced by the monitoring of mental simulation. Intuition is about expertise and tacit knowledge. It prepares us to see things that we couldn’t see before. It gives us the ability to make fine discriminations. It helps us to better our pattern-recognition capabilities, and alerts us to possible dangers. Intuition is a consequence of the experience we’ve built up.
(The writer is a biotechnologist and ED, Birla Institute of Scientific
Research, Jaipur)
