By the time executives get to high levels, they are good at making others feel confident in their judgment, even if there's no strong basis for the judgment.

Society's epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, Here's what I'm going to do - and you follow him.

You need to take your gut feeling as an important data point, but then you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it, to see if it makes sense in this context.

If you mean, My gut feeling is telling me this therefore I can act on it and I don't have to worry, we say you should never trust your gut.

People who design decision aids and information technologies usually try to help people perform their jobs better. But insights can show us how to perform our jobs differently. And so the decision aids and technologies can get in the way of insights!

Many business intuitions and expertise are going to be valuable they are telling you something useful, and you want to take advantage of them.

Intuition is when we use our experience, and the patterns we have learned, to rapidly size up situations and know how to respond without going through deliberate analysis. Intuitions depend on the patterns we have acquired. Insight is about gaining new patterns.

Most corporate decisions aren't going to meet the test of high validity. But they're going to be way above the low-validity situations that we worry about.

You need strategies that help rule things out. That's the opposite of saying, This is what my gut is telling me let me gather information to confirm it.

If you are committed to the change, you're going to have to sideline the skeptics, or at least keep them under control. There may be a temptation to move them out but skeptics have a value - flagging weaknesses in the plan. Ideally, you will enlist their critical stance by challenging them to find ways to improve the plan as you go forward.

Slow adaptation is driven by forces such as evolution. Fast adaptation is driven by forces such as insight.

Many change initiatives are poorly thought out, and rolled out prematurely. Others are genuinely good ideas but the proponents underestimate the amount of time needed to make the change. And, I agree, true change usually requires people giving something up and so resistance is pretty well guaranteed for any meaningful change.

I worry about leaders in complex situations who don't have enough experience, who are just going with their intuition and not monitoring it, not thinking about it.