Rapid Decision-Making: Hunch vs Facts

I learned something new about myself today, which is always cool because learning about what makes ourselves—and others—tick helps us navigate our world better, whether in our personal lives or in our acquisition-related careers.

A lot of Contracting Officers I’ve worked with, and especially Procurement Analysts in Policy, can’t seem to get enough data to make a decision.  Or the decision is a quick no until they have more data. Lots and lots more. It’s incredibly hard for them to get to YES. To someone like me, it seems that it takes them forever.  At the same time, these same people preach about how we need all this information to make a decision and if I don’t need as much as they do, then I’m obviously being flippant or sloppy or incompetent.

That’s not it, at all.  It’s how we are wired, and we are NOT all wired the same.  In any career field.

For me, I often think, “Good grief!  Just make a decision and get on with it!  If it’s the wrong decision, then you can correct your course later.”  That’s not true of every decision, obviously (security, safety, and ADA violations, in particular), and there were decisions I made that took a lot longer and some I felt I never had enough information.

To be really open here, most of those too-slow decisions were in my personal life and had to do with ending a relationship of some kind.  I had plenty of data—I just didn’t want to act on it. I ignored my intuition. I took way too long and instead of looking at the data to leave, I was desperately looking for data to not leave. Once I made the decision though, I was done. Permanently. No second-guessing.

In my profession, the intuition-based decisions have been easier than you might expect. The times when decision-making was hard in my Contracting Officer role was if my action might endanger the end user I was buying for.  If my inaction might endanger them, that wasn’t a hard decision at all.  Even if I suffered blowback from it.

To others and—until now—to myself, it seemed that a lot of my decisions were based on hunches.  I just knew something would turn out a certain way if I pushed forward, even if it didn’t make sense to other people.  Even if I didn’t have the data to back it up.   And, probably not surprisingly, even if I had plenty of data and still went with my gut feeling about what would work. Let me emphasize here that going with my gut worked every time.

I could spend weeks gathering data and still make some oddball decision that my gut instinct said was right, even if contrary to what the data suggested I should do.   Every time I made a business decision based on a hunch or on intuition rather than what I perceived as facts, I was right.  The times I questioned myself and felt pressured into a decision supported by everyone else’s data, the results weren’t good and I had to course-correct quickly.

Today, I learned why, thanks to advice from a business coach I met at a conference last year.  While others gather information through historical data, surveys, market research, reports, and interviews and consider the results to be facts, I’m so strongly intuitive and input-oriented that I’m also gathering facts.  Just not in the same way.  Or in the same way but more ways than others realize. I can point out certain things in my childhood that made this strength/talent/secret power part of how my brain is wired because they were survival skills at one point.  I have the ability to take in a ton of information and see patterns and potential outcomes that might not show up in historical data, surveys, etc.  It’s usually those unseen things that inform my decision to take a certain course of action that the other types of information don’t provide me.  So regardless of how much information I gather—and I like research A LOT—I can still go against the grain and have a fabulous outcome.

All this time, I’ve been thinking that I was basing my decision on something “woo-woo” or on a tiny part of the data or in spite of the data.  Not so.

For me, for how my brain is wired, I’m able to take in information very rapidly and use it to make a decision so quickly and firmly that it seems like a hunch.  Or like I haven’t thought it through.  I can’t explain to colleagues that “I just know” without sounding flippant or like I haven’t done my homework. The truth is, I did my homework as a child and learned to take in all kinds of information quickly to be able to get myself to a safer situation. That taught me to process everything around me and everything I could use to make the right decision about fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

I wish I’d understood to trust my gut when I was, like, 30 years old. Maybe younger.  I would certainly have left some doomed relationships in my personal life because I would have understood that I had enough information to make a decision, even if the overt facts were hidden from me at the time.  I could also have explained myself better to my acquisition colleagues who thought I was flying by the seat of my pants sometimes and were always surprised at how well my strategies worked out.

Once this was explained to me today, something clicked for me.   I can give myself a little more grace now for how I take in information and make informed decisions, but informed in a different sort of way.

And I suppose that means I need to give more grace to those who don’t have enough information to make a decision, because understanding this in myself means I can understand the opposite better in others and all my colleagues on that spectrum of decision-making.