👩🏻💼 Intuition is a luxury
👩🏻💼 Intuition is a luxury
How to empower everyone from the CEO to the PM make "good" decisions
Visionary builders are thought to rely on their intuition. This is why they are “visionary!”, some might claim. And in the early days of start ups it is correct: Many times founders said to me “hey, I want to do [this], is it a good idea?” Consequently, I spend some time researching and analysing only to come to the conclusion that “yes, within 10% of what you said, we should do this, and here is how…” Intuition works, until one day it doesn’t.
Intuition is a mirage. It is the product of a subconscious process of listening, clarifying, (internal) debating, and forming a point of view.
Take this story for example:
Once upon a time there was a popular restaurant known for its vibrant atmosphere and eclectic menu. The owner, Chef Marco, prided himself on his ability to create dishes that tantalized the taste buds of anyone who walked through his doors. Business was booming, and it seemed like nothing could go wrong.
One day, Chef Marco decided it was time to shake things up and introduce a new dish that would set the culinary world on fire. He’d seen a new trend his rivals were putting to good use. In his excitement, he rushed to put together a recipe, add a new fancy supplier to the roster, and make a splash on social media.
But disaster struck! Loyal customers hated the new dish, there were walk-outs, and his reputation got tarnished. It took him 79 days but he went back to his original menu, the one his customers loved. He had ignored his customers and their context.
His intuition had failed him miserably.
Chef Marco is Coca Cola in their introduction of New Coke in the 80s.
As a Strategy & BizOps team, our role is to make Intuition explicit. Why? So that we can empower everyone from the CEO to the PM to the junior analyst to make good decisions. I use a mental model for decisions that goes something like this:
🎧 Listen - get the Facts. Regardless of how senior you are, go to the horse’s mouth. Whether it is quantitive data pulled from new reports, or qualitative insight giving experience flare, get your information from the front lines.
🔮 Clarify - ask Questions. Understand the context of the Facts. Get together as a cross functional team, and align on your common understanding of the data and insight. Make sure you see what others see and vice versa.
🦍 Debate - get the Experts to talk to each other. The key is to bring people with credibility, and vested interest in resolving the issue to mould the argument. As the BizOps team, your role is empower an ultimate decision, not (necessarily) make it.
🧭 Decide - pull together data and emotion in a story. Take people on a journey about how you got to the decision. What did you listen to, how did you interrogate the data, what debate followed; ultimately, what is your point of view and why?
When you do 100 of these, and do them well, then you can start forming an Intuition. If the last time you listened was 6 months ago, you have no intuition. You only have wishful thinking about the situation.
As the Strategy & BizOps team, you can empower people across the org to conduct decision-making in this manner. And you supercharge these teams; and you supercharge your company.
As always, if you have questions or comments about this article, please connect with me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vessclewley