BUD HADFIELD ON THE VALUE OF GUT INSTINCT IN DECISION MAKING
Use this to justify your use of gut instinct.
Bud Hadfield (1923–2011) was the entrepreneur who founded Kwik Kopy in the United States. A hugely successful businessman and writer, he recognised that not all data can be quantified.
When it’s time to make a decision about a person or a problem … trust your intuition [and] act.
Bud Hadfield
Bud Hadfield is not alone in thinking that managers should rely more on their gut instinct. Friedrich von Hayek won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on free markets. He showed that one of the reasons why planned economies are always doomed to fail is that it is impossible for decentralised staff to report everything they know about local conditions, problems and opportunities to the centre. This is because much of their knowledge resides in their subconscious but informs their thinking and actions on a daily basis without them being aware of it.
You have probably encountered numerous situations where you ‘just knew’ what the right decision was and were subsequently proved correct. Or maybe you’ve been on the end of a new manager’s decision to implement a new policy or process that you and your staff know is doomed to failure but can’t put forward a reasoned argument as to why it will fail. Which of course it subsequently does and the manager blames the staff’s lack of support for the failure. In both cases, it was your tacit knowledge at work.
So how can you improve your tacit knowledge?
WHAT TO DO
- The key to increasing tacit knowledge is to store information in your mind. Use every opportunity to gather information about your organisation from staff, managers, customers, suppliers and wider stakeholders constantly.
- Walk the job (see Quotation 54) and talk to everyone, from the office cleaner (you’d be amazed at what information they see lying around on people’s desks) to senior executives and members of the board and everyone in between.
- Use meetings and the general chats and banter that occurs before and after them as an opportunity to add to your store of information.
- Use observation at meetings to learn about the people present, including their attitudes, beliefs, motives and relationship with colleagues.
- Read reports that appear in the press or on the web about your organisation.
- Always be on the lookout for clever ideas in other organisations and sectors that you can import and adapt for use in yours (see Quotation 82).
- Keep a learning journal and jot down any interesting comments, events, trends, problems, opportunities, threats or juicy gossip that has any bearing on your company.
- Even stuff you see on TV or come across in books, newspapers and professional journals can be useful fodder for your tacit knowledge.
- Your unconscious mind accumulates all these disparate and unconnected pieces of data where they are allowed to ‘compost down’ and form linkages and connections in your brain which enrich your tacit knowledge. Then, when faced with a problem, this knowledge will inform your thinking either consciously or subconsciously and provide you with an answer.
QUESTIONS TO ASK
- Do I use a mixture of hard data and instinct when making decisions?
- Do I try and exclude what my gut is telling me when I make a decision?