The four types of intuition managers need to know

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing but data-rich environments, managers at all organisational levels need to use appropriate intuition, balanced with analytic thinking, to create and capture opportunities. Intuition is often thought of as a single construct, but our two-year longitudinal study of multiple managers developing opportunities uncovered four distinct types of intuition: expert intuition, based on previous experience; creative intuition, based on a sense of direction for a novel solution; social intuition, based on a sense of interpersonal relationships; and temporal intuition, based on a sense of the timing being right to create or capture an opportunity. We offer a range of recommendations regarding the strengths and limitations of each type of intuition. With a more nuanced understanding of the types of intuition, managers will be better equipped to leverage the strengths—and be wary of the limitations—of intuition in their own decision making and that of others.