Trigger Question #145:
You make decisions. Constantly. What to wear. When to have more coffee. Where to go for lunch. And then there are trivial decisions. Like what gift to buy to please your partner.
If you are a manager or a leader, your decisions are more intoxicating. They make your ego feel powerful and important because your decisions affect other people. And you get to dish out scarce resources.
The fun part of making leadership and management decisions is that you seldom have all the information you need. And what information you do have is seldom perfect. So you make assumptions.
Because decisions must be made.
And because you must decide, even before all the perfect, pertinent information is available to you, you go with your gut.
Big mistake.
You should only trust your gut-judgment after you have exhausted all sources of enlightenment, be they research, analytics, big data, little data, and maybe even AI. And only after you have, over years of practice, already filled a vault of experience dealing with similar decisions.
Meaning that you should only trust your gut once you have trained your gut, through intelligence gathering and practice, to be trustworthy.
In other words? Don’t trust your gut too soon.
But how will you know when it is okay, not too soon, to trust your gut? Why, ask your gut, of course.
Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.
. . .