Gut instinct is not guesswork
Chapter 3 of my upcoming book
A veteran firefighter leads his team into what looks like a routine kitchen blaze and suddenly orders everyone out. Seconds later the floor collapses. Gary Klein’s field studies of fireground commanders - later formalized as the Recognition‑Primed Decision (RPD) model - explain this kind of “hunch.” Experts don’t simulate options under time pressure; they recognize patterns in subtle cues (too quiet, too hot, wrong kind of smoke) and act. The “gut” is recognition made fast, not guesswork.
Is this relevant in marketing too? Relevant in a world of abstract strategies with a lot of time to think and strategize?
Multiple studies compared the decisions of chess, golf and handball players after 1 second vs after 1 minute thinking time. The results – counterintuitive. Decisions after 1 second had been always superior.
It is about the complexity of the situation not the time restriction that makes intuition powerful. Science found three groups of strong intuition. The firefighter example falls into the “spidy sense” category - a hunch that something is off – a prediction that the situation does not align with a workable concept.
“spidy sense” is a hunch that something is off
When John Ledger (former CEO of T-Mobile USA) sat down with the Prophet consultancy back in 2012, they brainstormed ideas after being overwhelmed with customer insights reports that not has been conclusive. Someone in the room (it is not reported who) felt like gotten stroke. It was a felt truth that violated everything the industry ever believed in. Ledger later summarized it this way: “We simply stopped doing what everyone hates - and started doing what people want instead.”
A jolt intuition is a sudden, disruptive flash of insight that shakes you out of your default thinking and reorients your perspective toward an unexpected but compelling solution. It’s when an intuitive hunch doesn’t just feel true, it actively jolts you into a new frame — often with emotional intensity, urgency, or clarity.
John Ledger had been breaking the industry mindset that you only can make money in telco by squeezing, forcing and manipulating the customer to do what you want.
“Jolt” intuition is a realization that a past mindset is actually not true or useful.
Unilever was running a new series of consumer research in 2003–2004 to understand how the brand DOVE could be revitalized. Women in focus groups and surveys kept saying things like “I don’t feel beautiful” or “Those ads aren’t for people like me.”
Joanne Brashear from Ogilvy was puzzled. She’s often credited with first saying: “Wait, isn’t the real story here that women don’t see themselves as beautiful at all? That’s the tension we should build on.”. She was struck by a first Eureka intuition to reframe the category problem as a cultural truth.
Silvia Lagnado (Unilever brand director) then had the guts to say: “Yes, let’s make this the core of the brand — not just an ad line.” Her Eureka was more strategic: “Authenticity can be our brand’s edge against everyone chasing perfection.”
A Eureka intuition is the sudden realization that reveals a simple, powerful solution hidden in plain sight — the kind of moment where confusion instantly flips into clarity and you just know you’ve cracked the problem.
“Eureka” intuition is when confusion flips into clarity.
Intuition comes in different forms and in different intensities. We have
· Eureka: Confusion about a solution turns to clarity
· Jolt: A mindset, an unaware belief is collapsing and it becomes obvious that it was wrong.
· Spidy Scense: This situation feels off or a theory is wrong, you sense it is dangerous to follow it.
We have all those intuitions every day, mostly that mildly we do not notice. When you feel something is off before leaving the door and then realize you forgot your key. It might by a Spidy Scense in the first place.
When a colleague is too friendly to you all the time and suddenly you get this “feeling” he is playing a game. It might be a Jolt.
Or you are occupied with a puzzling Excel problem as the program freezes all the time. Suddenly the idea hits you that putting the auto-calculation of formulas need to be set off. It might be an Eureka.
Small problems are solved with small Eureka. Small dangers are detected by small Spidy scense. Small micro-strategies are changed by small Jolts.
All our doing as a human – including how and what we buy – is govern by the intuitions. Even more astonishing: all our thinking, all our rational, has a starting point, this starting point, a trigger is set by an intuition.
How do we know that? Couldn’t it be that those “intuitions” are just a result of smart and fast thinking process?
Science is very clear on that: No. The part of the brain that performs rational thinking (the prefrontal cortex) has six layers of neuron and it takes physically at least a second that the traveling of the electrical and chemical signals arrives to any conclusion. Intuitions instead are proven to be available in milliseconds.
Intuition is clearly a result of different brain regions.
In a foggy market, a compass beats a high‑resolution but wrong map. In noisy data, noise‑cancelling beats high fidelity. In management and marketing alike, a good gut is intelligence on a budget. Simple rules honed by feedback, powerful precisely because they know what to ignore.
But there is a catch
Instinct can be powerful and far from guesswork. Especially when data is incomplete either in terms of the relevant factors or in number of examples.
Still intuition has a partly bad reputation. Why is it?
People typically trust their own intuition. But we often mistrust others’ intuition. And this mistrust can be a clever intuition on its own.
From the outside, it’s just an opinion. How can we know it is born from a well-informed intuition?
Maybe it’s just something born from fear or risk-aversity? Maybe the person has a personal agenda, or he has a biased line of thinking? Maybe the person’s opinion is not intuition but hyper rationalization?
Our intuition again holds lots of truth in it. In a later chapter I will develop how you know that you can trust your own opinion and how you can make sure the opinion of your coworkers is guided by potent intuition, not brain fog, overthinking or fear.
Only if we have a process and checkmarks that help us to distinguish intuition from emotion, only then we as an organization are able to fully harness its potential.
Where does the intuition come from?
There is probably not one answer to this. When you take the fast intuitive decisions of chess, golf or handball players, those are obviously a result of massive advantage in experience. This is the main and dominant explanation: experience forms intuitive heuristics.
Intuition is fed by all senses. Some neuroscience books mention that our perception processes 10 million bits per second while our rational mind does just 40 bits. This massive amount of parallel information gives the intuition the power for nuanced decisions – a nuance of multimillion-dimensions that rational mind is logically incapable to comprehend.
The human brain seems to be super-efficient. A human that took 20 car driver lessons is processing less than 1 Terrabyte. Self-driving car systems like Waymo needed estimated 1.000.000 TB to be able to drive in San Francisco. This example tells a lot. The AI we are using today is not running the same algorithms as our brain does.
One reason for the efficiency might be that the human brain trains a world model. When toddlers crawl, they already learn something that can be used later for driving.
It is even known that many intuitions we already have by birth. We fear spiders from the first second. Lions fear cars, even if they have never seen them. Mammals fear fire by birth. Out brain obviously comes with an operating system. Only humans need many month to walk, most others can do this right from the start. Operating system at work.
Science just started to understand intuition and instincts. Because they are not consciously generated it is hard to get a hand around it. With Neuroscience we may measure intuitive results. We may learn which brain regions light up. But all this does - at best- tell us just indirectly where it sits and how it is generated. We should be ready for more scientific discoveries around intuition in the future.
Intuition is not a lucky guess - it is experience and wisdom compressed into a single moment of clarity. The leaders who change industries and the firefighters who save lives have one thing in common: they trust that inner signal when it matters most.
In business, as in life, data can guide us, but it is intuition that gives us the courage to leap. The challenge is not whether we have intuition - we all do - but whether we are brave enough to listen to it.