Hone Your Instincts

I was teaching a course the other day that involved decision making techniques. It turned out that the folks in the class with years of experience felt secure about making instinctual decisions. And, it turned out, that those faced with the same decisions for the first time question their ability to make instinctual decisions.

I was advocating avoiding making instinctual decisions. However, I do believe in them and they can serve a leader very well if you understand where this decision making process is coming from.

An instinctual decision, sometimes called a gut decision, comes from some emotional side of you in a rational world. It is a very rapid process and if you trust your instincts you can make quick decisions. The peril is that these are not reliable decisions. Sometimes it can be a good decision and sometimes a bad decision. So how do improve your odds at making a good instinctual decision?

Listen, read, and learn. The more you understand your subject matter the better you can determine what works and what doesn’t work. Figure out how your experience generates common threads on different subjects. Is there a way that dealing with your kids is similar to dealing with your co-workers? These common threads create behavior patterns in your mind that become tools for you to use to make decisions. Read about other people’s experiences, read the newspaper, internet postings, watch tv, read a book, or read a magazine – just something everyday. Listen to the story and think about what worked and what didn’t work? Someone else has made a mistake and now they are sharing it, learn from it and grow.

How does this help? You are building a toolset in your mind of different patterns so when a new experience comes up it is likely you are already familiar with some of the elements. You appear to make a quick and rapid instinctual decision but that is only possible because you did your work to develop your mental toolsets.

If you make a bad decision you can go back and take a look at the information that went in to the decision making process and compare it to your toolset. Learn from your experience and next time you will likely get better results.