People sometimes are so confident in their flawed beliefs that they get stuck - fixated - and as a result are blinded to insights that are right in front of them.

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.

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.

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.

There needs to be a certain structure to a situation, a certain predictability that allows you to have a basis for the intuition.

The most valuable insight I have made about how people make decisions is that when they become skilled they don't have to make decisions - choices between options. Instead, they can draw on experience and the patterns they have acquired to recognize what to do, ignoring other options. This is the basis of the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model my colleagues and I described thirty years ago.

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.