What is the best way to go about making personal career decisions? Business doesn't often set a trustworthy example with the faddish decisionmaking that follows the recommendations of the latest so-called guru. And decisions about careers are either mandated by the organization or ignored. What is clear, however, is that to a significant degree both business and career development decisions are largely relegated to intuitive decisionmaking. The failure rate for intuitive decisionmaking, however, is terrifically high.
As a result, today there's a strong movement afoot to reject a great deal of both intuition and conventional wisdom in favor of research-based, or what's often called evidence-based, decisionmaking. And rightly so. Pfeffer and Sutton get at the issue in the title of their book: Hard Facts. Dangerous Half-truths and Total Nonsense. They reveal numerous reasons to reject much of intuition: it's based on guess or hunch, lacks data to back it up, shows poor results and puts organizations at risk.
So what does that say about intuition? The best studies on the subject say that intuition is actually rapid pattern recognition: the ability to recognize patterns in masses of disorganized data. As the mind works with data, similar experiences from the past, which have been internalized and resolved, suggest a comparable way to resolve a current problem. However, as I've already alluded, the data we've internalized and stacked away in our long term memory, as well as the old resolutions, are often dated, inadequate or wrong. On top of that, two major threads of research make it very clear that we cannot usually trust our memory and certainly not "gut feel."
At the most elementary level, since intuition is built on previously internalized problem-solving experiences, it takes quite a while to develop much in the way of intuition. It takes a career history with a set of similar problems for intution to be very trustworthy. A few years ago, my client architecture firm hired a bright MBA as COO. In numerous situations, the CEO told him to use his intuition in solving problems as they came along. Jamie, the new COO, complained to me that he didn't have enough experience with architecture to have developed trustworthy intuition. His insight was exactly correct. His comment about intuition was so unusual and so accurate that it immediately surfaces whenever the issue of intuition comes up.
So the real students of thinking are attempting to build a deep repertoire of evidence-based solutions that can be internalized to eventually become intuitive. Expertise development is a slow process, but students of decisionmaking have found that developing fact-based deep smarts is the best way to go at the whole process of intuition development if you want good results.
The Sunday New York Times Magazine has an insightful, even brilliant article on the distinctions between intuition and evidence based medicine by David Leonhardt, a Times economics writer. Leonhardt contrasts the orientation of the eminent Jerome Groopman, chief of experimental medicine at Harvard's Beth Israel Hospital, and author of the recent blockbuster, How Doctors Think, with the evidence-based medicine of Brent James of the Intermountain Hospital Group. Groopman argues that evidence-based medicine is useful in only limited run-of-the-mill situations like distinguishing between strep throat and a simple sore throat. Human beings are not uniform in their biology and as a result diseases act differently on different people. Groopman argues that the way to do effective medicine is not evidence-based, but to train physicians in the ways in which their instincts can lead them astray and teach them to reflect, learn from previous mistakes and act with more accurate intuition.
As an educator I'm very skeptical, and so is Atul Gawande, Groopman's Harvard Colleague at Mass General. In his book, Better, Gawande points out that the research shows that physician expertise is no different than expertise in other fields: only a few physicians actually become experts, while the rest are merely competent.
In contrast, Brent James of Intermountain Hospital Group argues from results, pointing out that the use of evidence-based medicine at the Intermountain centers has saved thousands of lives a year across that hospital network, and he has the data to prove it. James tracks patient outcomes and adjusts patient care. As conclusions are drawn from the data, he creates protocols that are institutionalized by the hospitals and their health care professionals. The protocols are not left in concrete. They are revisited, the data is followed, and then they are fine-tuned.
The contrasting positions of Groopman and James have an extensive history. These arguments, as Leonhardt rightly points out, are as old as Plato, who thought that knowledge came from intuitive reasoning, and Aristotle, who preferred observation.
So why does intution bring such poor results? As I've suggested, few of our original experiences or conclusionis are fact-based. Typically, the narrow set of career experiences provides too little focus on the consequences of our decisions. Following Groopman's line of thought, very, very few are trained in the thinking skills necessary to manage bias. Then there's also the well-known fact that most of us stop learning after the first four to six years of experience, by which time we've become merely competent.
When you analogize from medicine to careers and career development, the weakness of the intuitive approach applies directly. Furthermore, the history of the career discipline is largely anecdotal, in spite of the recent availability of huge research resources on careers. As I noted in a previous blog, if you check out the 3,000 or so tomes for sale on career you're going to find very little substantial help. Although they offer advice on everything from resume writing to the color of your career parachute, they're all built on a single 75 year-old notion of what a career should look like. If you're older than 30 you probably know what I'm talking about--a step-by-step climb up the corporate ladder. Since the 1970s the corporate ladder has been going the way of the Dodo bird--killed by technology, global competition and flatter and flatter organizational structures.
Two of the most prominent conclusions on career are largely intuitive, and based, at best, on half-truths. Follow your passion, we're told. I point out that the notion will not stand up to scrutiny. [See the research here.] When it comes to career choice, there's other research [here] that shows a far better approach. The second prominent conclusion focuses on choosing careers that will leverage your strengths. But too often, we don't know what our strengths are until we've fumbled around in several jobs, and/or had some astute person define our strengths for us. This is all like the notion of personal branding. The major limitation is that our clients or colleagues determine our brand, not us.
Furthermore, both of these conventional, intuitive conclusions stand or fall on the marketplace. Unless the marketplace has need for our passion and our strengths, we're going to be out of luck. So I'm wary of intuition, mine as much as that of anyone else.
