The head chef of a busy restaurant can tell a sauce is about to split before anyone else in the kitchen notices. She can’t always explain how. Something in the colour, the sheen and the sound of the pan tells her to pull it off the heat. Her instinct is almost always right.
The restaurant’s owner has instincts too. A year ago, he walked past an empty unit in a new development and simply knew it would be a perfect second location. The feeling was just as strong as the chef’s. The second restaurant closed eight months after opening.
Both were trusting their gut. Both felt equally certain. So why was one instinct reliable and the other so costly? Two of the world’s best-known researchers on decision-making, who came from opposite camps on the question of intuition, set out to answer exactly that, and found they largely agreed.
One Like insight: Feeling certain and being right are not the same thing. The difference lies in where your instinct was learned.
A failure to disagree
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist, built much of his career on documenting the biases that lead even experts astray. Gary Klein, by contrast, spent decades studying how firefighters, intensive-care nurses and military commanders make remarkably good split-second decisions. They were often described as being on opposite sides of a debate about intuition.
In 2009, they wrote a joint paper in American Psychologist to map out exactly where they disagreed. Its subtitle, “A failure to disagree”, gives away the result. They concluded that judging whether an intuition can be trusted requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which it was formed, and of whether the person has had a real opportunity to learn its patterns.
In practice, that means two conditions. First, the situation must be regular enough to contain reliable patterns, as a kitchen, a chess board or a burning building does. Second, the person must have had plenty of practice with quick, clear feedback, so they learn which cues matter. When both are true, expertise and good intuition can develop. When either is missing, a confident gut feeling may be little more than a convincing story.
One line from their paper deserves particular attention: subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgement accuracy. In other words, how sure you feel tells you very little about whether you’re right. The chef and the restaurant owner felt equally certain. Only one of them had learned her instinct in conditions that make intuition trustworthy.
Testing your own gut
For a small business owner, the practical value of this research is a simple test to apply before acting on a strong feeling. Ask two questions.
Have I seen this exact kind of situation many times before? A hairdresser judging how a client’s hair will react to a colour, a mechanic diagnosing an engine by its sound or a baker reading dough has usually made the same judgement hundreds of times. A business owner deciding on a second location, a major acquisition or an entirely new market may have done it once or never.
Did I get quick, clear feedback each time? The chef knows within minutes whether the sauce worked. The owner choosing a location may wait a year to find out, and even then won’t know which of many factors made the difference. Slow, muddy feedback makes it very hard to learn reliable instincts.
When the answer to both is yes, your intuition is probably worth trusting, especially when time is short. When the answer to either is no, treat the gut feeling as a hypothesis to test, not a conclusion. That’s where tools such as the premortem and a better decision process earn their keep.
Kahneman and Klein also agreed on a warning for leaders. People who rise to senior positions are often good at sounding confident, and others tend to follow confident judgements. That makes it all the more important to ask where the confidence came from.
[Infographic placement] When to trust your gut. A 2×2 grid. Horizontal axis: Practice in this exact situation (little → lots). Vertical axis: Feedback (slow and unclear → quick and clear). Top-right, green: Trust your gut (the chef, the mechanic). Bottom-left, red: Test it first (new location, new market). Other quadrants, amber: Check with data or others. Caption: Kahneman and Klein (2009): intuition is trustworthy in predictable environments where people have learned the patterns.
Using intuition wisely
None of this means ignoring your instincts. Intuition is often the fastest route to a good answer in familiar situations, and experienced owners have built up genuinely valuable judgement in their own trade. The point is to know which kind of situation you’re in.
A useful habit is to say your gut feeling out loud, then ask the two questions above. If it passes, act on it. If it doesn’t, use it as a starting point: gather some evidence, ask people who see the situation differently, or test a small version before committing fully. And when you’re making a big decision far outside your usual experience, be especially wary of the feeling of certainty.
A few questions can help:
- Is this a situation I’ve handled many times, with quick feedback on how it went?
- Where does my confidence come from: experience, or a convincing story?
- What evidence would tell me my instinct is wrong?
- Could I test a small version before committing fully?
Which brings us back to the chef and her sauce, and the owner and his second restaurant. The chef’s instinct was built on thousands of sauces, each with instant feedback. The owner’s was built on a feeling about a place he’d never traded in, with nothing to compare it to. He wasn’t wrong to have a hunch. He was wrong to treat it with the same confidence as hers.
Sources
- Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, “Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree”, American Psychologist 64(6), 2009.
- McKinsey Quarterly, “Strategic decisions: When can you trust your gut?”, March 2010, interview with Kahneman and Klein, for the point about confident leaders.
