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

The ability to help others gain insights seems very important to me, and I think one of the most effective, but most difficult, ways is to listen sympathetically when people seem to be saying stupid things or thinking in confused ways. Rather than write them off, we can try to diagnose what is wrong with their thinking - what flawed belief they might be holding. And then search for ways that enables them to discover the flawed belief for themselves.

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

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!

It is instructive to see how organizations pursue their goal of reducing errors and uncertainty. They impose standards, employ checklists, demand that knowledge workers list assumptions for their conclusions and document all sources. These actions either directly interfere with forming insights or create an environment where insights and discoveries are treated with suspicion because they might lead to errors. They signal to knowledge workers that their job is not to make mistakes. Even if they don't make discoveries, no one can blame them as long as they don't make mistakes.

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.

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.