Gut Feel

Gut feel is the immediate response you come to about something, based on intuition. It is formed nearly instantly due to the sum of your experience and training, based upon the available information you have.

The degree of accuracy varies from person to person, but the common aspect for everyone is that there is no way to tell whether the gut feel is accurate or not until after action is taken.

In continuous improvement, we advocate the mantra ‘facts and data’, but there is a time and place to act on gut feel instead of deep analysis.

Gut feel fills an important role in continuous improvement, but it can be, and often is, relied upon too heavily.

Let’s start with the good.

Gut feel is great for ‘just do it’ type of projects, or daily improvements. This means when the risk is low and your gut feel tends to be pretty accurate, there is not a great risk in putting it to use. In fact, we actually want a bit of trial and error on little things because it keeps momentum.

Let’s say your gut feel is right 70-80% of the time, and every day, you make one little improvement. The average number of workdays in a year is 260. At 75%, you would have 195 correct ‘gut feels’ and 65 misses. Because the changes were easy to make, they are also easy to undo. The misses get fixed or removed right away, so you end up with 195 first time changes, probably another 20-30 fixed changes, and a similar number of completely wrong changes that are thrown out.

The cost of the misses is generally going to be pretty low, and the gains are going to pay off every day for as long as they are left in place. Clearly, acting on gut feel for daily management stuff is a no-brainer. Just do it.

Now, for projects where the cost to implement is high and the cost of failure can be even higher, you can’t rely on gut feel alone.

But there is a big place for it.

The first is in the act of recognizing a problem in the first place. If you have metrics tracking things, problems jump out at you. But a machine operator may just have a hunch that something isn’t right about a machine and shut it down to check things out. Or a manufacturing manager may recognize something about her production line before the metrics start highlighting the problem.

That gut feel is important to act on, even though the action is likely just an investigation.

Once you get into the project mode, though, gut feel is important for figuring out what to measure, where the problem might be, who might know what to do, and what to actually do to fix things.

All of those things should be confirmed, though. And that is the big difference between people who let their gut feel be an asset and those that let it get them into trouble. When gut feel guides scientific, fact-based action, it drives great success. When it is used to bypass the grunt work of diving into the nitty gritty of numbers and data collection and analysis, it is an impediment to your success.