Entrepreneurial sixth sense: how intuition drives stronger
decision making
Adam Werbach was the Sierra
Club’s golden boy.
He grew up in Los Angeles where, as a 7-year-old,
he would check Smog reports before his morning T-ball practices. A morning
habit fueled by an enormous love for the environment and a vision for a greener
future.
At the age of twenty-three, Werbach became the youngest president in Sierra Club history — one of the leading
environmental organizations in the United
States that promotes climate solutions and conservation.
He hit the ground running and immediately began
harnessing his youthful energy, smarts and perhaps a bit of intuition to
drastically change the way the club operated.
The young activist was loved far and wide and had
accumulated a large following… that is until he made a business
decision that nobody saw coming.
Adam Werbach decided to take a consulting gig at
nonother than… Walmart… the organization that many conservationists believe
embodies everything the Sierra Club stands against.
Suddenly, Werbach went from touring the country
and giving 200 speeches a year in front of raving supporters to not being able
to speak in public without private security.
In an
interview with Fast Company, Werbach
shared:
“I attended this event and someone came up to me and said ‘I wouldn’t
feel safe if I were you. People have gotten hurt.’”
However, the death threats were only a portion of
the blows Werbach faced in his decision to go from green to blue.
His friends and colleagues pleaded that he change
his mind and to this day, some of them refuse to talk to him.
Two activists even went on to write an open
letter about the former
Sierra Club president, The Death of Integrity: In Working With
Wal-Mart, Activist Adam Werbach Is Abandoning His Principles.
Something that, if you are Werbach, probably
wasn’t the most joyous thing to read with your morning cup of coffee.
However, fast-forward through over a decade’s
worth of backlash, Werbach is beginning to see that his controversial decision
to join Walmart was the right one.
Since taking the consulting gig at Walmart,
Werbach has helped 40% of the company’s employees embrace sustainable
practices.
He has been instrumental in not just lessening
Walmart’s impact on the environment but improving the quality of life of its
workers — one of Werbach’s movements has helped 12,000 Walmart
employees quit smoking.
Besides spear-heading many of Walmart’s
sustainability initiatives, Werbach is now working with large brands like
Proctor & Gamble, General Mills & Sony BMG to do the same.
He argues
that his decision to leave the Sierra Club and join Walmart has given him a much larger platform to
spread awareness about sustainability and environmental conservation.
When your intuition can make the world a better place
Athletes call it instinct. Hipsters
know it as vibes. Scientists claim it’s intuition. You
and I probably refer to it as a gut feeling. And, the more
spiritual among us might think of it as a sixth sense.
Regardless of how you might refer to it, most of
us have experienced a “feeling” that we can’t quite describe — whether that be about a
person, event or in Werbach’s case a major business decision.
In business, a lot of times we are taught
that every decision we make must be data-driven but it turns out some of the world’s top
minds rely just as much on feelings as they do on hard facts…
From Henry Ford, Boeing’s Bill Allen to Uber’s
Travis Kalanick, such counterintuitive, radical, “you’re nuts” thinking
led history’s many courageous people to some profound
successes.
Same goes for big dreamers like Walt Disney, Elon
Musk and Steve Jobs… it’s apparent that vision and drive haven’t been the only
thing on their sides… but some deeper feeling too… Intuition or
a thing that one knows instinctively rather than through conscious reasoning.
Jobs was an outspoken believer in intuition famous
for saying his number one rule of business was to trust your heart and
your gut.
But what exactly is this feeling? Does it really
have any validity?
Could you pass the intuition?
Sonia Choquette is a globally celebrated author and coach
that works with executives on harnessing their intuition to make better
business decisions.
She argues that by using intellect only and avoiding your innate wisdom, you
are keeping yourself from the most valuable insights.
However, even Choquette warns that intuition
shouldn’t be followed blindly and is much more effective if an individual has
deep insight and experience in the particular industry they’re making a
decision in.
That’s where science comes in.
In the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes, a study was published by researches at Boston
College, Rice University and George Mason University that found:
Intuition is effective
when making a decision in an area where the decision maker has in-depth
knowledge.
Micahel Pratt, an expert in organizational
psychology and a researcher on the study above had something fascinating to
share on the subject of intuition, “Intuition is like nitroglycerine — it is best used only in certain circumstances.”
Like Choquette, Pratt also warns that one must be
careful using their gut in an industry they aren’t entirely familiar with.
Touse some real-life
examples… if you’re a Chief
Marketing Officer that has worked in consumer goods your entire life and a
young entrepreneur approaches you about investing in their biotech company, you
should think twice before investing, even if you have a “really good feeling
about it”.
However, if one of your employees comes to you
with a marketing campaign and something inside of you is telling you… “Dave,
you have to give this a try. This really could work”… that might be your
intuition talking.
This intuitive approach has played a significant
role in our steady growth at JotForm, including influencing our
decision to conduct some crazy marketing experiments such as the one I’ve
recently explained on the Buffer blog.
Yes, it’s a “feeling” we can’t quite describe but
it somehow manages to convince us that we should give it a try… it
really could work.
Applying intuition to
your life isn’t easy
As I wrote in “How every
decision you make is wrong”, intuition
can be a bit ambiguous.
In particular, tracking it may be the most
challenging part. It’s easy to make up our initial feelings about someone or
something after the event has already played out.
For example, if a business relationship falls to
ruin, it’s easy to say “I never had a good feeling about that guy” after the
fact… whether that’s true or not.
With that said, if you’re
really keen on testing your instincts, grabbing a small notebook and tracking your feelings about
a decision (before you actually make the decision) can be helpful — once the decision has
actually played out, you can go back to your notebook and compare the outcome of the decision.
Best-selling author Lewis Howes calls
reflection practices like this one tuning into your synchronicity or paying attention to initial feelings
about things, peoples, events and decisions.
After Lewis
Howes watched his father suffer a traumatic brain injury due to a decision he believes could have
been prevented if he had shared his intuition, he has made it a pivotal part of
every decision moving forward.
While I wouldn’t recommend betting a million
dollars on a hunch or a gut feeling… I wouldn’t recommend avoiding this feeling
altogether, either.
In addition, as I explained in “How to make better decisions in life and in business”, not
all decisions are created equal.
Some can be put on autopilot (like what shirt to
wear every morning), some may be given based on intuition alone, while others
demand real time and attention.
It isn’t black or white either. Partnering up with
someone, hiring employees, and choosing a career path, for example, can both deserve your
cognitive energy and instincts to some extent.
Aytekin Tank
https://medium.com/swlh/entrepreneurial-sixth-sense-how-intuition-drives-stronger-decision-making-fc906624641c
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