Visionary Decision Making Happens at the Intersection of Intuition and Logic

In the 1980s the psychologist Gary Klein studied fireground commanders to learn how they made life and death decisions under pressure, and he found that they rarely compared options at all. One commander, called to a kitchen fire in a single storey house, led his crew to spray water on the flames, but the fire roared back, and without knowing why, he ordered everyone out. Seconds later the floor collapsed. The fire had been in the basement beneath them. He had sensed that something was wrong with the heat and quiet, and his sense was right. The topic proposes that visionary decisions arise where such intuition meets logic.

Intuition, in Klein's account, is not magic but recognition. A person who has seen thousands of cases compresses them into patterns that surface instantly when a similar case appears. Herbert Simon said as much when he wrote that intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition. The expert chess player sees a position at a glance, the doctor suspects a diagnosis from a patient's walk, and the farmer reads the sky. This is knowledge that has become too fast to be put into words.

Logic does a different job. It lays out assumptions, checks the steps and exposes inconsistencies, and so it can correct an intuition that has gone astray. The mathematician Henri Poincaré described how, stepping onto an omnibus at Coutances, the solution to a problem on which he had worked for weeks came to him whole, with no apparent reason. He then went home and verified it carefully. The flash came from the unconscious, and the verification came from reason. He regarded both as necessary to discovery, with logic to prove and intuition to invent.

Indian history has its own case. In 1930 Gandhi decided to march to the sea at Dandi to break the salt law. His colleagues in the Congress were puzzled, since salt seemed a trivial subject beside independence. Gandhi's choice came from a sense, which he attributed to an inner voice, that salt touched every household and could unite the country. But he and his colleagues also worked through the logic, calculating the tax's burden on the poor, the legal grounds and the response of the government. The vision was intuitive, and its execution was methodical.

The vision was intuitive, and its execution was methodical.

Organisations can build the combination into their routines. Pilots follow checklists but are also trained to report a feeling that something is wrong, and hospitals use scoring systems for deteriorating patients while allowing nurses to escalate on worry alone. In both settings the rule is that a hunch is a reason to look harder and not a reason to skip looking. Logic then does what intuition cannot, which is to show its work and be audited, while intuition does what logic cannot, which is to tell where to look first.

Each faculty alone can fail. In 1998 the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, run by traders and two Nobel prize winning economists, collapsed after Russia defaulted on its debt, an event its models had treated as practically impossible. The Federal Reserve organised a rescue of billions of dollars to prevent a wider crisis. The same overconfidence in mathematical models helped the financial crisis of 2008. Logic without judgement can be precise about the wrong thing. A model describes the world as it was, and does not know when the world has changed.

Intuition fails as well, often in a pleasant manner. Daniel Kahneman has shown that people are prone to biases when they follow their feelings, anchoring on a first number, trusting a vivid story or being overconfident about what they know. Kahneman and Klein, who had disagreed for years, concluded in a joint paper in 2009 that intuition is trustworthy only when the environment is regular enough to be learnt and the person has had a chance to receive clear feedback. Chess and firefighting qualify. Predicting the stock market or the fall of governments does not, and the hunches of confident experts in such fields are little better than guesses.

The American handling of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 shows how the combination can work at the highest level. President Kennedy convened an executive committee that debated options in detail, with advisers arguing for air strikes, for an invasion and for a naval blockade. He listened to the logic. But he also relied on a feel for Khrushchev, shaped by his reading of the origins of the First World War, which made him cautious about escalation. When two letters arrived from Moscow, one conciliatory and one harder, he chose to answer the first and ignore the second. It was an act of judgement that no checklist would have produced.

How can a leader tell whether a hunch is expertise or bias? The answer lies in asking whether the field has stable patterns and whether he has been corrected by experience in it. A prudent leader tests the hunch against data and invites others to attack it, as a pilot cross checks an instinct against the instruments. Then he allows the numbers to be overridden if he can state why. Teams with a culture of challenge tend to make better visionary decisions than those where the leader's instinct is not questioned. A leader who learns this habit is protected from both the tyranny of the spreadsheet and the tyranny of the gut, and he is spared the later discovery that he trusted one of them for too long.

The word visionary suggests seeing what others cannot, and it is that capacity that cannot be fully explained by either faculty. Logic works on what is known, and intuition draws on what has been experienced, yet a vision concerns what does not yet exist. The decision to build the first railway or to open a school for girls in the nineteenth century was both calculated and leaped across a gap. Whether that leap is a third faculty, which can be trained, or simply luck seen afterwards by the winners is a question that neither the hunch nor the proof has been able to settle.