How often is your gut instinct right?
With boso, ibtalk and now auctomatic, the instinctive decisions have always been the best. I'm wary of the term 'common sense' because I don't really think it's all that common. Also, what's really weird, is that at time x, you can believe 100% and with everything in your heart that decision y is the best course of action. At x + 3 days, you can then believe, also 100% without any doubt, that decision y was wrong and that you should now do z. It's not that that is indecision, it's just that things can move so quickly and variables change so much that you can change your mind 100% about something without too much difficulty. (and I've been using 100% too much). I believe an important quality of a CEO is to be able to do that, and continually convince himself that the latest course of action is the most prudent, but more importantly, convince his team that it is the right path to take too, (and that bit of advice came to me from someone who works at Yelp).
Question is: Do you really need something like gut instinct?
I think there's one thing that it is appropriate for: Quickly needed decisions with a "social background", if you are experienced at judging human behavior (I don't know the exact English word for "Menschenkenntnis").
Else: Don't do it. Do not decide based on pure gut instinct. Try to get something more dependable: Ask friends, ask experts, talk to people who know more than you or provide a different point of view and then judge their comments against each other. There's almost always a way to get the information you need if you have the time, and it's very seldom you don't have time.
Then it brakes down to experience and self-confidence, I guess. Luckily, my gut instinct is right, usually :-)
Do you mean "gut instinct"? I go by that a lot and have been learning how to trust it more. More often than not, my initial reaction is right.
If you're interested, here's a link to a book about this topic:
One of the reasons I asked this question is because recently I participated in a webinar by marketingexperiments.com . The folks at MEC said they tested three different price points for a product - $10, $12, $15 (something like that) and asked the audience, many of whom were marketing professionals, which price they thought performed the best. The majority of them were wrong.
The moral, in that case, was that a marketer's instinct is a fine thing, but doing online testing gives you real knowledge of the situation. By doing testing not only can you learn if your instinct is right, but you can glean information about your users/visitors as well.
Does your gut instinct lead you to make good decisions more often than bad ones? Does it work better for you in some areas than in others? For example, are your decisions about marketing more often right than your decisions about strategy? Or does it work better for you with small decisions compared to large ones?
Back when I was in school I noticed a pattern emerge while taking tests over freshman year: If I changed a test answer a statistically HUGE amount of the time I changed it from the correct answer to an incorrect one. After noticing this pattern I stopped second guessing myself!
Very often, it's like masochist, the problem is, I'm not submissive :)
intuition can mask prejudice