When to Trust Your Instincts
A few intentional acts can save you from yourself
How many times have you heard it said that successful CEOs have great instincts? There will be many crucial decisions over the course of your career where the right answer isn’t obvious and data alone can’t make the choice for you. You’ll be called upon to use your instincts in these situations, so it would be good to know whether or not to trust them.
To decide that, it’s helpful to know where our instincts come from. Some of our instincts are derived from our pre-conscious preferences. In his classic article, “Thinking and Feeling: Preferences Need no Inferences,” psychologist R.B. Zajonc explains that our traditional understanding of human liking and disliking is all wrong. We prefer to think that we are rational beings and that our preferences derive from a process of encountering an object, assessing it, and only then formulating an opinion about its goodness or badness. In fact, some of what we choose to like or dislike involves pre-conscious leanings that are, if anything, part of our inherited DNA. Why do you like one flavor of ice cream while I like another? Why do you like a person when others don’t warm up to them? What explains your taste in music? In the business sphere, preconscious preferences affect our appetites for risk-taking, the value we place on creativity compared to analysis, our thoughts about what makes for a good team member, and much more. We can’t explain our preferences; they just are. That’s why, “preferences need no inferences.” They simply exist. We can disagree about them, just as we can argue about whether chocolate is better than vanilla, but we can never resolve our differences scientifically. No amount of lived experience or time in a given role will change these hard-wired, pre-conscious preferences. We can only become more aware of them so that we understand why we are seeing things differently than our peers. Importantly, we need to accept that these preferences don’t make us right and others wrong. If we are in the ice cream business, we shouldn’t let our flavor choice cloud our business judgment; deciding to produce only chocolate or vanilla wouldn’t be smart. More practically, we shouldn’t let our preference for a particular strategy, talent profile, or return to work policy cloud our judgment without carefully considering the alternatives.
While some of our instincts are unexplainable and hard-wired, others are derived from our lived experience. We touched the hot stove and developed a strong aversion to ever doing that again. Such an experience may have inclined us to never go near a stove again, but then additional lived experience taught us that others seemed to be able to touch a stove without burning themselves and that, when approached in the right way, stoves could actually prove useful. In other words, we learned and added new knowledge to our previously held data base of experiences, resulting in new instincts developing over time. We have a strong tendency to trust the instincts we have developed even though we may not remember the specific events that shaped the way we currently think about things. When challenged to explain our beliefs, we find ourselves saying things like, “I just know it’s true.” Others, with different lived experiences, may have come to different truths and feel just as strongly that what we are proposing is a mistake. As CEO, you have to decide whether to trust your own instincts or listen to the arguments of others, even though they can’t always explain themselves clearly.
To make things even more interesting, there is evidence that we humans have some built in self-defense mechanisms that don’t always serve us well. In pressure-packed situations, for example, you already know that when attacked, the amygdala in your brain assumes control of your thought processes, producing fight or flight responses when you really need your frontal cortex to be thinking calmly and rationally.
You may also have heard of the fundamental attribution error, something taught in every entry-level psychology course. In a nutshell, when things don’t go well for us it’s not because we are stupid, ill-intended or not motivated to succeed. Something in the situation caused us to fail; the competition, someone who let us down, the inability of our researchers to innovate. The cause for our failure is external to ourselves. Only after repeated failure and perhaps some unfriendly feedback from others do we consider that the reason for our failure may be within. On the other hand, when others fail, we quickly see them at fault and ascribe incompetence, mal-intent, or a lack of commitment to them as explanations for their failure. Accompanying this bias, we see ourselves as above average in intelligence, caring, trustworthiness and other positive traits but less likely than others to do something foolish, act in an unethical manner, or treat people unfairly.
Thus, we find ourselves in a situation where some of our instincts are hard-won and deserving of our trust while others spring from preconscious preferences, stress induced knee-jerk reactions or built in biases. When we say that a CEO has good instincts, we are saying 1) that the person has some naturally good instincts; 2) has learned the right things to do over time; and 3) knows when to question their own judgment when the grounds for their preferences are suspect.
If you want to develop instincts you can rely on, there isn’t much you can do about #1; you either inherited certain good preferences in decision making or you didn’t. Your goal should be to simply be aware of them so that you recognize when they are entering into your judgment. However, you can do something about #s 2 and 3. The way to expand upon what you have learned through experience is to undertake more experimentation. People who play it safe, stay in their lane and don’t stray far from home don’t learn much compared to those who do the opposite. Of course, the more you experiment, the more hot stoves you will encounter, which is why this kind of learning is often avoided. Nevertheless, it’s true that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from never trying at all. You can trust your instincts more when they have been developed over time, through repeated experimentation.
Addressing #3, the challenge of learning when to question one’s judgment, requires that one adopt a humble stance rather than an overconfident one. Confidence is absolutely necessary; you wouldn’t take a first step without it, but overconfidence is another matter. It’s hard to recognize overconfidence on your own. Usually, it takes help from others. The trick here is to understand when you have crossed the line. To invite criticism requires humility and courage. Admitting to yourself and others that you could be wrong is difficult, especially when you are the boss and you think being wrong may shatter other’s confidence in you. Still, making the effort to suspend judgment long enough to hear the thoughts of others can trigger insights that lead to better decisions and outcomes. Doing so can also leave you more confident in your initial stance, which can free you up to take bold action that you might not have considered previously. Or, it can direct you to actions you may not have thought of that are an improvement over your initial plan. As an added bonus, inviting input rather than simply charging ahead increases the psychological safety of those around you, making it more likely that they will let you know when you are about to steer into a ditch. That’s worth its weight in gold. You can still get things wrong, but if you do, you will have the opportunity to learn from another hot stove moment that will serve you well in the future.
As human beings, we never stop learning. If we accept that our instincts may not always be perfect and intentionally engage in behaviors that help us learn, someday we may become one of those people with good instincts that we’ve heard so much about.