How Intuitive is Intuition?
Distinguishing Expert Intuition from Lay Intuition is the latest in a series of IDEO articles in GOOD Magazine. It does a wonderful job of laying out what the standard blind spots are for judging the quality of intuition, as well as how to compensate for them when talking to people. People can’t say how often their intuition is correct, as the successes stay with them and the failures are just chalked up to being bad guesses. This is the same reason that people still tune into TV shows where people claim to talk to the dead. There may have been a million bad guesses, but that one successful hunch somehow proves amazing insight and intuition to the people watching.
The catch is that in order to become truly good at deciphering other people’s intuition, you need to develop that immediate intuition yourself. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is by putting in the prerequisite 10,000 hours it takes to truly develop your intuition to the point where you can trust it. Once you reach the point where you easily and comfortably intuit your conclusions as well as the reasoning, you have also reached the point where you can no longer teach someone else how to do it, as you no longer remember what it was like to not simply know.
It’s easy to tell a bad interview from a good one from a great one, even to the most clueless person watching. The only way to move from bad to great is by getting in there and doing it yourself. Make mistakes, try new things, and learn from your successes. Talk to people you admire and learn from their work. It won’t be an easy journey, and there will be a lot of failures. One day, however, you will simply know, and wonder how you ever didn’t.