Kahneman’s two systems — fast intuition and slow deliberation — are a useful map, but leaders need more than a choice between them. Intuition can be trained, tested and made reliable. This piece explains how, and why a leader’s felt sense of a situation is a resource to develop rather than a bias to correct.
There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.
—Albert Einstein, Where is Science Going, Introduction (1932)In 2011 the now late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman published Thinking, Fast and Slow, which distilled his vast and highly-regarded body of research encompassing systematic thinking, behavioral decision-making, intuition and heuristics — mental “rules of thumb.” In it, Kahneman described a two-system model of mind and decision-making.
For Kahneman, System 1 was fast, intuitive, emotional and instinctive, whereas System 2 was slower, more analytical and deliberate. We humans are designed to conserve energy, and seeing that System 2 was far more energy hungry than System 1, his proposition was that we would often default to instinct and heuristics to save gas. Equally, in the more urgent of our life circumstances, intuitive systems importantly save time.
During our evolution, that clear band of logical linear thinking kept things simple as we avoided predators, hunted for food, and looked for shelter. But even this logic was always ultimately informed by the powerhouse of the larger consciousness operating under the hood. Anyone who hunts, or knows a hunter, understands that their skill lies mostly in their intuitive senses far more than their logical ones.
To Kahneman, the downside of this intuitive system is that it is ineffably prone to error. We harbor cognitive biases, we can be subject to the effect known as priming, and we’re also prone to simple old Pollyanna-ish optimism and overconfidence. Considering all of this coming from such an eminent mind, it would seem that any attempt to consider intuition as a source for good decision-making might have stumbled right here at the first hurdle.
But perhaps we might not want to jump the gun.
Our culture has mostly lost its connection to this wise underlying resource, favoring a top-down approach in our education system, and therefore in our workplace. What is needed is a way to enhance the dialogue between both these two levels in us — to have each one complementing and assisting the other.
That dialogue is the work. It’s what the 95% names, and what Process-Oriented Leadership™ is designed to train.
Curious how this lands in your organization? The assistant can point you to the right program, or you can tell us what’s going on.
