decision making

  Last class in Organization Behavior, our professor presented a nice deck on decision making.  This was my favorite slide.  We talked about the Blink vs Think debate.  The quote on the slide amused me, because I gather that what he talks about is peculiar to certain companies.  I've never worked at a company where middle management made decisions mostly based on quantitative thinking.  The real take away here is that people overuse their intuition in situations where intuition is not called for.  It's usually not correct, and most people think they are 'special' and give it too much credit.  However, sometimes, your intuition is right-on.  And ultimately, correct intuition can be far more powerful than critical reasoning.  It's important when to know when to seek guidance from your intuition, and when you should slow down and be very critical and methodical in your thinking.  It very much depends on the problem domain and the situation.

Comments

[Jason]

This dichotomy between thinking and feeling out answers is a huge conundrum. I have another one for you, in my profession (USAF) most of the upper management is determined by who achieves the better testing scores in Squadron Officer School. These exams tend to test a little leadership theory and a lot of USAF history. Now imagine that these are the people who will be leading the AF. It would be great if the selection system had more of a technical aspect and a critical thinking aspect......