As reported in U.S. Rolled Dice in Bin Laden Raid, the green light to eliminate Mr. Osama Bin Laden eventually came down to “gut instinct.” While we all understand the role of numbers and rational thought in business decision making, we think that the West sometimes places too little emphasis on what can oftentimes be your best friend in uncertain times: your gut.
As we all know, there are times in business when the numbers tell the whole story. There is no gray area. There is no need to use your intuition to make a decision. And yet many decisions in business are not so black and white. For one thing, the numbers may be cooked by the seller of the stock you are thinking about buying. You may not know this by looking at the numbers, but may intuit it by feeling out the underwriter or broker. Like the Navy SEALS in the picture to the left, your eyes may not see anything behind those trees in your midst, but sometimes your intuition will tell you something is lurking there. Unfortunately, the West sometimes places too much emphasis on rational thought, and not enough on the value of intuition, a point that Mr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Perhaps this is because of a reductionistic approach to studying decision making taught by many schools in the West, including the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, which oftentimes attempts to reduce the complexity of human decision making into mathematical equations. While this may be a helpful crude tool to understand a complex system, it is is not sufficient. Due consideration also needs to be placed on the role of intuition — the gut — in making good decisions.