Your gut feeling matters!

Is being logical the same as getting it right?

When was the last time that someone said “According to my gut feeling, I believe that we should go ahead with this project” and got praised by the rest of the people in the room as a smart decision-maker? Most probably, the answer is— Never!

People who make decisions based on their gut feeling are perceived to be less smart in contrast to the people who bring all the excel books, pie charts, graphs, and research papers to the table. Basing decisions on data is politically, rationally, and logically correct and that is undeniable. But there is something fundamentally wrong in this perception. Let’s break it down, step by step.

First of all, what the hell is ‘gut feeling’?

Why do you think people get paid for their experience? When a person is working on something for a longer period of time, they develop skills and knowledge around their work and domain and they genuinely make mistakes along the way and continuously learn from them. The result of this learning process is what employers look for when they write job ads that say “…with 10 years of experience”.

The ability to make decisions, referring to prior experiences is gut feeling. You are getting paid for your gut feeling, not the number of years.

But, why ‘gut’?

There is science and especially biology behind ‘gut feeling’. Apparently, your brain is trying to be as predictive as possible, all the time! It always analyses past experiences and incoming sensory information and tries to predict what might happen next. You can read more about this here. I am no medical expert or scientist to comment further on human anatomy but I was fascinated to see that there are actual research findings that talk about the direct connection between the brain and the gut through a neural circuit. You can read more about this here. So maybe, the feeling in the gut can be a direct stimulation that is generated in the brain due to the predictive process.

Gut feeling is how your body reacts to the current information, based on the similar previous situations you have been in.

Gut feeling is not random opinions. If it is a random opinion, it should not be categorized as a gut feeling. However, next time you hear someone trying to make a point by saying “My gut feeling says…”, maybe you should not stereotype that person as illogical or irrational. Instead, try to motivate and help the person to back his or her gut feeling with data.

Gut based, data-informed decisions will change the world.

If you were interested in the topic and willing to explore further, this episode of ‘Design by 3’ podcast where we talk about design decision making, could be your next step.