Listen…
“Should we hire him or not?” my colleague asked me again.
I looked up hesitantly. The guy had the education, was able to express the subject knowledge well and seemed hard working. But there was something wrong, I couldn’t really put my finger to it. But we were in dire need of an additional team member. Won’t harm much, I thought. Let me go ahead with it.
One of the many instances I have gone against my instinct or intuition, whatever you may call it. And as usual, I ended up regretting it. My initial judgement was spot on.
As a person working in the field of data science, I may seem as if I am betraying my tribe by asking people to rely more on intuition and less on the facts. But frankly, I am just acknowledging the limitations of availability of facts. In the incident at the start of this article, the one of the reasons I went against my intuition is because I was not able to articulate what was wrong. If probably I had been able to capture it as a data point properly, I wouldn’t have gone ahead with my decision. Our brain is much more superior than we sometimes give it credit. It learns better than any other algorithms and can withstand the ambiguity which the machines can’t.
But in our zeal for being logical, we probably try to oversimplify and end up missing those nuances which our brains picks up subvonsciously. These cues seem so obvious in hindsight, don’t they.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Blink” covers these aspects of decisions that we make within a fraction of a second seemingly without having full knowledge.
Nowadays, I have almost started deliberately recording this first instant sort of conclusion that I come up in the first 10 seconds, lest I forget it when I have thought through and reasoned it more. Intuition is not some vodoo magic but just better reading of the tiny signals. Isn’t that why your intuitions are even stronger when it comes to your loved ones? An unsaid word, even a slight change in the voice or that hidden expression in the eyes. People are mightily worried about how in the current scenario, the masks are hiding the facial expressions. But frankly, who cares about the smile that can be faked. If your eyes aren’t smiling, you probably aren’t.
The only problem with intuition is our trust for it. Do we end up confusing intuition with fool hardiness? What if we tag our every hesitation and fear, as intuition. Aah…only if it was so easy to distinguish.
Intuition doesn’t announce itself. Probably like so many other things in life, let it come to you, because it will…at the right place and right moment. Keep listening. It’s like tuning to the right radio frequency. Once tuned, the mistrust will drown just like the noise.
