One of the remarkable attributes of experts in a discipline or domain is how quickly they can assess and respond to a complex moment. In a flash, it seems, they cut through the noise, “see” the key components, and “read” the essential patterns that define the best range of response. Whether it’s a grandmaster chess player, a car mechanic, an ER nurse, a master craftsperson, a political fixer, or other form of maven, “intuition” is a core quality that helps them move quickly and decisively while others are still scanning the terrain.
While there are competing models and theories about how intuition works (Huburt Dreyfus and Herbert Simon among the most cited), most agree that intuition is fast, fluid, developed through practice, and rooted in agile perception. Also worth noting that insight and intuition are defined differently in the literature. Insight is the sudden discovery of a solution after a long, slow slog, intuition is the first flash of assessment/action.
Increasingly, empirical evidence and computer simulations suggest that intuition is built on rapid pattern recognition, perception and connection of “chunks” or “templates” that describe both situation and action, and an “embodied intelligence” that’s deeper than explicit, rational thought (Benner and Tanner, 1987, define intuition as “understanding without a rationale”).
Eye-tracking analysis of a newbie (gray) and an expert (red) while working to answer a financial question from a balance sheet (Grigg and Griffin, 2014).
Why does this matter to arts management? Because effective managers work in multiple complex and complicated domains every day — creative production, financial management, marketing, governance, finance, operations, policy, and all of the human systems therein. The most effective managers will have deep intuition that cuts to the chase, quickly observing, assessing, and acting (or directing action) moment by moment, day by day, and year by year. Or, they will assemble a team of intuitive experts and support their best work.
And yet we don’t talk much about intuition in our education, training, support, and decision systems for arts and cultural managers.
Take an example from the financial world. A pilot study to track eye movements among newbies, novices, and experts in accounting (Grigg and Griffin, 2014, see image) found that when answering common financial questions from a balance sheet, newbies looked all over the place, lingering in many places that weren’t relevant to the question. Whereas experienced, accredited accounting professionals focused their eyes quickly and more narrowly — much as a grandmaster chess player will immediately see the essential pieces and patterns on a board, while a novice is looking everywhere and nowhere.
If we agree that mastery in arts management draws upon extensive intuition within and across multiple domains; and if we agree that intuition derives from robust/rapid pattern recognition and action — some learned, some absorbed, some constructed through experience; then shouldn’t the way we train, support, and equip our arts managers embrace this understanding? What would a training infrastructure look like that brought intention to this work?
On the flip side, it’s worth noting that intuition — because it is so often built on embedded or embodied assumptions — is also a hot house for bias and out-dated/broken theories of reality. Any system that embraces intuition must also build checks and balances to be sure it is frequently exposed to the light.
For more on the above see:
- Gobet, Fernand, and Philippe Chassy. “Expertise and Intuition: A Tale of Three Theories.” Minds & Machines 19, no. 2 (May 2009): 151–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9131-5.
- Benner, Patricia, and Christine Tanner. “Clinical Judgment: How Expert Nurses Use Intuition.” The American Journal of Nursing 87, no. 1 (1987): 23–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3470396.
- Grigg, Lyn, and Amy L. Griffin. “A Role for Eye-Tracking Research in Accounting and Financial Reporting?” In Current Trends in Eye Tracking Research, 225–30. Springer, Cham, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02868-2_17.
Thank you for adding the caveat at the end there, Andrew. You mentioned marketing and I was getting worried.
The arts prop up leaders with no professional marketing training and no professional marketing experience and then encourage them to use their intuition to make life and death marketing choices. The thought of encouraging this behavior at a time when audiences are in steady decline is horrifying.
Thanks Trevor. It’s interesting that you seem to discount intuition entirely as a component of high performance. I agree that there’s a “hunches and hackery” version of intuition (thinking from the gut without the required hours of practice or study or analysis). But don’t you find that intuition — built on rigor and productive experience — plays a significant role in your own work? Does your mastery not include some interplay of conscious and non-conscious processes?
In several of the studies of nursing, they found that intuition was discounted, discouraged, berated, and critiqued, even when evidence suggested it as an essential component of effective health care. This strikes me as a narrow view that leads to negative results.
I’m curious if you only see a darkside/downside to this form of assessment and action in the world.
I’m fine with intuition in the hands of people with the right training and experience, but arts marketing is a quirky, insular, idiosyncratic process that’s governed by leaders who’ve had limited exposure to the way marketing is done in more professional environments.
The cultural sector faces earned revenue challenges that require serious, real world, professional marketing expertise, but its leaders are encouraged to make critical judgments based on amateur insider’s intuition.
I’ve worked with dozens of arts leaders whose intuition inevitably led to the worst possible marketing choices. The good ones, the smart ones, the most successful ones, (the rare ones,) were those who knew their job was to set aside intuition and rely instead on external market intelligence, relevant data and rational methods.
Among all the management disciplines in the arts where intuition comes into play, marketing is the one that’s most like science and most in need of non-intuitive execution. Ironically, it’s the discipline that’s most likely to be governed by well meaning but misguided hunches and hackery.
Spontaneity, acting in the moment of “right now” is also the domain of the intuitive. I came out of improvisational theatre and also taught it. Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theatre was my teacher’s bible. She argues that it may be that what we call “talent” is simply a greater capacity of experiencing. Experiencing is active; it can only happen in immediacy, in the moment of “right now.” When we are in the moment of right now, Spolin reminds us, we are in the domain of the intuitive, and that’s where our creativity lies. Most of our educational experience is not in the domain of the intuitive. (sigh)