The four types of intuition managers need to know

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing but data-rich environments, managers at all organizational 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 2-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.