Integrating Intuition and Analysis

The strategic management process can be described as an objective, logical, systematic approach for making major decisions in an organization. It attempts to organize qualitative and quantitative information in a waythat allows effective decisions to be made under conditions of uncertainty. Yet strategic management is not a pure science that lends itself to a nice, neat, one-two-three approach.

Based on past experiences, judgment, and feelings, most people recognize that intuition is essential to making good strategic decisions. Intuition is particularly useful for making decisions in situations of great uncertainty or little precedent. It is also helpful when highly interrelated variables exist or when it is necessary to choose from several plausible alternatives. Some managers and owners of businesses profess to have extra ordinary abilities for using intuition alone in devising brilliant strategies.

Although some organizations today may survive and prosper because they have intuitive geniuses managing them, mostare not so fortunate. Most or ganizations can benefit from strategic management, which is based upon integrating intuition and analysis in decision making. Choosing an intuitive or analytic approach to decision making is not an either–orproposition. Managers at all levels in an organization inject their intuition and judgment in to strategic-management analyses. Analytical thinking and intuitive thinking complement each other
  

Operating fromtheI’ve-already-made-up-my-mind-don’t-bother-me-with-the-factsmode is not management by intuition; it is management by ignorance. Drucker says, “I believe in intuition only if you discipline it. ‘Hunch’ artists, who make a diagnosis but don’tcheck it out with thefacts, are the ones in medicine who kill people, and in management kill businesses.”  As Henderson notes: The accelerating rate of change today is producing a business world in which customary managerial habits in organizations are increasingly in adequate. Experience alone was an adequate guide when changes could be made in small increments. But intuitive and experience-based management philosophies are grossly inadequate when decisions are strategic and have major, irreversible consequences.

In a sense, the strategic-management process is an attempt both to duplicate what goes on in the mind of a brilliant, intuitive person who knows the business and to couple it with analysis.