Go with your gut

Do you make decisions intuitively or analytically?

What if I told you that analyzing your situation might be more of a waste of time than you think? What if I told you that your intuition is actually a massive window into your intelligence?

In fact, ignoring the importance of intuition almost destroyed the Coca-Cola company.

You have a huge brain. Your brain is so big that you had to be born before it was fully developed, or else your gigantic head wouldn’t have made it thorough your mother’s birth canal. If we humans have one advantage over other species on Earth, it’s our giant brains.

Every second, our enormous brain is receiving tens of thousands of signals from all of our senses. Those signals are mostly “processed” subconsciously, and some small amount of them surface into our conscious awareness.

Your senses and intentions mingle with all of your memories and structured knowledge and produce the outputs that you consciously perceive. One output is coherent, semi-organized thoughts; the answers to questions, specific pieces of information, and so forth.

When you recall a person’s name, or consider how to do a math problem, those “answers” that pop up in your head are the organized result of analysis.

But your coherent thoughts are only a small fraction of the output your gargantuan brain has produced, and thousands of years of evolution has optimized us to perceive the rest of what we “know” nearly instantaneously, as intuition.

Other names for intuition include “gut instinct” or “a hunch.”

In the kingdom of tech, data and objectivity are the King and Queen, if you will, and they are quick to dismiss a hunch. I don’t suggest that you listen exclusively to your gut instinct, but I do think that your gut can help you more than you might realize… Just ask Coca-Cola president Donald Keough.

In the 1980s, Pepsi started the “Pepsi Challenge” campaign, which asked customers to do blind taste tests of Pepsi and Coke. This campaign was a huge success, and threatened Coke’s leading position in the market.

Coca-Cola decided to run their own experiment so they performed blind taste tests with around 190,000 people in the US and Canada. Unbelievably (to them), people preferred the flavor of Pepsi! Executives were rattled, so they hatched a plan.

In 1985, Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, Roberto Goizueta, announced that they had created a new formula, which they branded “New Coke.”

Coca-Cola president Donald Keough described it as “the surest move ever made,” adding “I’ve never been as confident about a decision as I am about the one we’re announcing today.”

It was a bad move. Coca-Cola’s stock tumbled, and upwards of 5,000 angry customers were calling the company every day to complain. Coca-Cola had to hire more phone staff to keep up.

Yet in the analysis, people clearly preferred the sweeter flavor of Pepsi and New Coke. They had data on their side, they had objectivity on their side. This product shouldn’t have failed.

So why did it fail? And what does this have to do with intuition?

What Coca-Cola overlooked is why people buy Coke in the first place. Spoiler alert: it’s not (only) because of the flavor.

Yes, people believe they prefer one flavor over the other, but the only way to reconcile the outcome of Coca-Cola’s own large-scale taste test experiment and the public’s buying behavior is to recognize that people buy Coke because they have what’s called brand affinity.

Brand affinity is an example of a weakness of intuition: marketers expose you to experiences (we call them “advertisements”) that you later unconsciously pattern-match, and which surface intuitively. Other weaknesses you may have heard of include prejudice and unconscious bias.

Nevertheless, your intuition delivers mountains of data that you can only access if you open your consciousness to recognize that hunch, that indescribable sense, that feeling in your gut. Sometimes the answer is not useful, and other times it is extremely useful.

Intuition is used to great effect by professional athletes, elite security personnel, and even stockbrokers.

For instance, some pro tennis players can tell when their opponent will serve a fault, but they can’t tell you why. That subconscious message is the result of their observations filtered through thousands of hours of experience.

Here’s a trick for recognizing your intuitive sense, which we call “expansion vs. contraction.” When you consider an option, if you have a feeling of opening, of possibilities, of abundance, then that is an intuitive “yes.”

If instead you feel contraction, limitation, scarcity, or closing, that is an intuitive “no.”

Of course this is not the only way that your intuition can show up for you. You might get flashes of color, or a feeling of warmth or cold in your chest, or something else entirely. It’s different for everyone. If you’ve had a unique intuitive experience I’d love to hear about it.

Some questions for you:

• How does intuition show up for you?
• What can you do to be more open to your intuition every day?
• What is possible when you listen to your intuition?

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