A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership | Hacker News Reader

A counter-intuitive guide to better leadership

sudarkoff.com

111 pointsmooreds52 comments

> Reed Hastings' decision to pivot Netflix into original content production is a great example ... based on years of experience in entertainment and technology

Is it? How do you show that? Was he just lucky? Did he divine the right answer by listening to the voice in his head?

I don't disagree with the premise; when your body is screaming at you to do something that should feel unnatural you should be listening. That's evolution and learned experience trying to steer you away from danger or toward some kind of reward. But the blanket statement of "Stop analyzing your gut feelings" is just silly.

My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time; if I didn't spend time thinking through the impacts of what may appear to be an "irrational" decision I'd expect to make many mistakes. This also gives leaders a complete scapegoat excuse when things explode (see WFH vs RTO, explosive hiring vs mass layoffs); hey, he was just following his gut, can't get it right every time.

> I don't disagree with the premise; when your body is screaming at you to do something that should feel unnatural you should be listening. That's evolution and learned experience trying to steer you away from danger or toward some kind of reward. But the blanket statement of "Stop analyzing your gut feelings" is just silly.

Unless you’re a pilot. Or a serial killer.

> My gut tells me to do stupid shit all the time

Does it? Can you provide some examples?

My intuition rarely lets me down. Perhaps you don't have enough experience in the areas where you are trying to listen to your gut?

I'm sure if I was trying to apply my intuition to an area I didn't understand at all it would let me down.

That is different from listening to my intuition in a field I have been working in for almost two decades.

You only have to read my sorry posting history to see where my intuition has let me down.

This kind of advice generally rests on it being useful to the majority. And I certainly have seen leaders who trusted their guts while making absolute dumb, idiotic and really avoidable mistakes on the way.

If you are a 2,5m of height and your basketball advice is to "just lift your arms and let the ball fall in", you are not wrong, but your advice only applies to yourself and a small minority with a similar physique. Similarily here, going with your gut is either good or absolutely horrible advice — depending on what someones gut tells them.

If you look at the history of violent crime for example, most of it was based on someone's gut feeling.

If you're the type who does a lot of overthinking and in hindsight could have just trusted your gut, it might indeed be good advice, if you're a bundle of bad impulses controlled by a thinking mind, rather not.

And advice that is not generally useful to all, should always be given with a caveat

An important part of leadership is explaining decisions so that everyone has sufficient understanding of the goals as well as their contributions necessary to achieving said goals. This also invites feedback that may improve the process of achieving the desired outcomes, or reveal that the decision conflicts with other initiatives.

I have a predictable response to leaders that cannot explain decision-making but instead hide behind hand-waving statements like "it's a gut feeling" and that response is "well then let's get a scalpel so we can share that with everyone else."

In addition, a gut feeling needs to be proven quickly and cheaply, so treat it as an experiment and strictly time-box it and have a measurable goal or milestones which must be met before the path is continued.

Leaders who have too many of these hand-wavey directions that fail, should be relegated to an advisory position to my mind, until they have better gut feelings or can articulate them better.

All these articles proposing "intuition" as secret magic dust is quite funny. This is culturally amplified by movies and media ("May the force be with you", "follow your feelings").

In reality, intuition is simply a pattern recognition mechanism that sometimes work. Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments. Our intuition has always said Earth is flat, Sun rotates around us, time is constant... Virtually every single thing in science is how our intuition (aka the primitive pattern recognition) was so magnificently wrong.

I think you have to distinguish here between your intuition, and the currently reigning common sense, which you just take for granted and which is not based on your own intuition.

> Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments.

This is not really the case. If you look into how a lot of great science is done it often starts with intuition followed by testing / experimenting in order to validate.

More often than not, that spark of intuition is tested by experiment, and turns out to be wrong.

99 attempts at creating a lightbulb... and counting.

I suspect the scientists intuition is less reliable because the scientists are acting at the limits of our understanding. Even then it is still a critical component.

For those of us writing glue code to connect services for the 100th time or a manager dealing with our 20th PIP is our intuition likely to be as faulty?

> If you look into how a lot of great science is done it often starts with intuition followed by testing / experimenting in order to validate.

Has turned into

> scientists intuition is less reliable because the scientists are acting at the limits of our understanding

Is that your gut telling you that?

Another way to put what I think they were trying to say -

If you have a lack of knowledge, the ‘rational’ set of things to try can be so large that it’s overwhelming/impossible to actually try them. You have to pick something.

Intuition can help there (and is commonly found in almost all major discoveries), even if it isn’t necessarily right. Since it’s still more right than not listening to it.

But then you need to pay attention and do some rational analysis to verify, and then iterate.

I have a lack of knowledge about the winning lottery numbers.

My intuition has never been any help on picking them.

Not listening to it, and just not buying the tickets would be more profitable.

Honestly, you're trying to claim that intuition is the foundation, when it's almost as bad as blind luck.

The most exciting phrase ever uttered in science is "Huh, that's not right" or "Woops"

> Honestly, you're trying to claim that intuition is the foundation, when it's almost as bad as blind luck.

Why do you think this?

You got me, I'm a closet genius that always knows without a shadow of a doubt what people are thinking.

It sounds like your intuition was just to not play, correct?

Or, after playing 10 times and not winning, to stop.

No, I'm still playing, in the vain hope I will win enough to get someone else to tell me what the winning numbers will be

Oh, that just sounds like you’re unwilling to learn from experience.

I prefer the term "persistent" although people around me have translated that to "stubborn" somehow :)

You misunderstand.

I'm saying intuition in a complex space we don't understand is less reliable than intuition in a simple well understood space.

Recognising that someone is angry is simpler than discovering how gravity works.

Science has a high failure rate and scientists heavily lean on their intuition.

This does not imply that it is intuition that causes the high failure rate.

I missed this - body language experts the world over will tell you that body language is culturally and individually unique.

Some people share similar body language for displaying certain emotions, but they are not universal.

Further you may be able to tell what some people are feeling by their body language, but there will be many many more examples where you miss the emotion.

Worse, the ones that you can get an idea of, it's very VERY rare for you to know the reason that people are in that emotive state.

edit:

This even applies to people close to you, who you think that you know.

I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to the title. I think there's definitely merit to not analyze your gut feelings. With that said, I would have a framework on when it is appropriate to trust them at least.

I once wrote a literature review essay assignment [1] on when to trust your intuition and why meditation can help you to feel your intuition better. It was for a class called cognition and emotion at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I remember specifically to write about this as it was slightly outside of the scope of the class. The professor green lit it because it was about cognition, emotion and we did have a lecture on how intuition worked in the brain.

That assignment has been life changing for me. Before it, I didn't really know much about how to train my intuition. Afterwards, I had an idea.

The assignment has been a long time ago, but what has remained in my mind is that:

1. Your intuition can only be trusted when you're an expert on something - or at least have some experience.

2. The experience needs to have enough volume and enough regularity. Think chess, but poker is fine too. With poker you just need more examples but ultimately there's regularity in the game. It's just more fuzzy. However, the literature showed that getting expertise/experience in something like clinical psychology can be way tougher as a clinical psychologist sees a low amount of patients (not thousands but dozens) and many clinical diagnoses are fuzzy in unpredictable ways as we have little clue with many conditions how things are caused or if we're even talking about the same thing inside a particular condition (e.g. many misdiagnoses happen).

3. Experience is narrow. You think you're a people person? Sure, but if you've only been a people person in the US, it won't transfer well to other cultures. Your intuition will fool you. There's a relearning period needed there.

4. You can strengthen to feel your intuition by enhancing your interoceptive awareness. This can be done by mindfulness meditation.

Yea, that's it? I think?

It's in part based on the work of Kahneman and Klein. Not the pop psychology books but their actual academic work. It's also based on some neuroscience that other researchers did. I vaguely remember something about beginner and expert Shogi players (Japanese chess).

[1] https://melvinroest.github.io/articles/intuition.pdf

> I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to the title.

:) Yes, but it's not every day that someone also follows up with a paper.

In fact your points above closely align with exactly what the article says.

This reminds me of this quote I love:

> "[They] placed too much weight on the introspections that they generated at that moment in time, and thus lost sight of their more enduring attitudes.” [1]

The quote refers to this study [2] in which subjects had to chose a poster to take home. The group who was instructed to think about their reasons for their initial choice, and had the option to change it, were less satisfied with it three weeks later. As the abstract says:

> When people think about reasons, they appear to focus on attributes of the stimulus that are easy to verbalize and seem like plausible reasons but may not be important causes of their initial evaluations.

This suggests that satisfaction is more correlated with initial gut feeling than reasoning, at least for aesthetic choices, but I think in many other cases as well.

[1] https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00401-2

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616729319301...

This vindicates my plan to get a tattoo of the "Shockwave" jet semi truck

Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers one after another, day after day. Some degree of self-control is probably warranted.

Come on, that's not what they're talking about at all.

It's exactly what they are talking about. Metaphorical or literal, gut feelings can become wildly miscalibrated, e.g. due to food going from scarce to common. Introspection and discipline are needed to keep it from going terribly wrong, and while diet is a good example and riffs off the metaphor it absolutely applies to other gut instincts too.

Honestly, my gut is much less welcoming to the idea of me visiting McDonalds than my mouth.

My gut says “I will feel bad”, my mouth screams “tastebuds demand an experience!”

Right, and there are better burgers than McDonalds. My point here is just to bring up an example of instincts getting horribly miscalibrated in a way that highlights the need for thoughtfulness and self-control.

Make no mistake, the term self-control doesn't just apply to food instincts, it applies to people instincts too. Your instincts want you to go around assuming that ugly people are bad and pretty people are good, but if you avoid every uggo you're gonna miss out (especially in tech) and if you trust every handsome salesman you meet you're gonna get rolled. Thoughtfulness and self-control are always warranted.

You can calibrate your gut feeling, though. You do it, every day, as you go through life. You get a gut feeling that a specific person might be difficult, and you can override it consciously.

But I often find that the “gut” feeling is more often right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact that it takes hundreds of little things into account and models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling you will have in the end as ”gut feeling”. Your own black box of neural networks in your gut.

On the contrary, my gut feelings tell me that eating a lot at McDonalds will make me sick.

Fun fact, the guy who made "supersize me" also had a crippling liquor addiction when he was filming it. I'm not saying it's great food but the perception that eating it for a month will make you ill is hilariously overblown.

Imho, I think a lot of people assume cheap food will make you sick because it's cheap and americans tend to moralize pricing. A balanced diet is obviously better for you, but the human body is extremely resilient to nutritional imbalances in the short term.

What tends to drive unhealthy trends linked to fast food (or other highly sugary or fatty foods) is just price point and ease of consumption. It's a lot easier to buy burgers than it is to figure out how to fit making rice and beans efficiently and tastily into your already busy lifestyle. Buying calorie-dense food that's easy to consume will always be attractive.

Exactly. This trope gets repeated all the time about "listen to your inner voice" or "gut feelings" and we hardly ever talk about the alternatives. My gut tells me all kinds of things, sometimes contradictory things depending on the time of day. And its all but impossible to discern the difference between what my "gut" is telling me vs what the little voice in my head is telling me, which may very well be at odds. Plus all this is corrupted by "dopamine chasing" behaviors, or the equivalent. Add on top of that people for whom their gut instincts may have led them into pain in the past. It's not simple at all.

> Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers one after another, day after day.

Are we talking about the same thing here? When the article is talking about gut feelings it is referring to intuition.

Your intuition is probably telling you eating McDonalds cheeseburgers day after day is a mistake even while the scales are telling you it is fine.

I use my intuition a lot and have learned to listen to it. Sometimes though, it sucks when you intuit something, turn out to be correct, and you don't really have a good explanation to your peers as to why you knew it was correct. I remember one time in my career, we knew we had a rogue server somewhere (out of probably 100k+) we had to decommission but no one in the org knew where it was and everyone that did had long been gone. All we knew was that it was out there in the stack somewhere, because we'd see the effects of its existence elsewhere in the metrics, but this thing was like a complete ghost. All we had to go on in the end was nginx logs that had hundreds of thousands of IP addresses in them, go through them one at a time with a script and run a certain curl to it, and hope we got lucky it was the one we wanted. Even then there was a ton of false positives.

I was skimming through it on a call and a certain address just popped out to me. I said "that's the one, I'm pretty sure I've seen that before." I had no real reason to believe this, I just had a very strong feeling that I recognized it from somewhere and felt like it was the right one. Sure enough it was. People on the call wanted to know how I knew, and I couldn't really describe it, it was just pure gut. That doesn't really translate well in a professional setting, people will think you're weird or withholding/hiding something.

Isn't this the sort of thing e.g. Klein researches? You can read up on that to get better terminology to discuss your intuition in terms of.

It’s on my reading list, will check it out. I’m neurodivergent and I think it comes out in stuff like this a lot.

Mh. I'm treating too many things like chess, but in chess, intuition of very competent players tends to be deep pattern recognition. This kind of positive or constructive intuition in a concrete context warrants analysis imo.

This analysis allows discovery of the patterns recognized by the competent person, which teaches. The master level player calculates a couple of moves, and then ends up worried about a tactical threat. That's a useful way to think to learn about.

I have the same thing in tech. I can usually and pretty quickly figure out in what area and component an issue would be in. Our new colleagues have developed a habit of asking Why. And this has led to great knowledge sharing sessions and has in fact taught me a few things as well.

Though at the same time, among the technical leaders of the company, we've started to accept negative intuition without much explanation as well. If two or three people with decades of experience don't feel good about a decision, that's a bad thing. Even if they cannot voice that in a concrete way so far. Hiring is similar - an actual, but not necessarily concrete or constructive Nay out of 3 is a Nay overall.

Interesting HN post today on Zarathustrian philosophy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1t0hrl4pE

Are gut feelings naturally based on one's moralities or sense of justice? Are leaders typically moralistic in their decisions?

Chris Hitchins would probably argue that morals are innate--but what about in business? What if your gut feeling is based on some unjust yet common practices? Does that make you a "better" leader?

Just tossing this out there...

> Contrary to common wisdom, which suggests using analysis to verify gut feelings, intuition often works better as a final check on analytical decisions.

This doesn't mean not to analyze your gut feelings. I don't see where the author makes this case at all. You can do both. You can pay attention to your gut feeling as a final check on analytic decisions and you can try to understand where that gut feeling is coming from (and in fact I believe you should).

Reminds me of this article that seems disappeared from web, so here my copy:

https://www.svilendobrev.com/1/MeetingtheSpecandOtherSoftwar...

"Warm fuzzies aren't in the spec."

One of my personal favorite reasons to yell at the sky is the legions of managers who style themselves as "leaders", who show up to provide exactly zero leadership (at best), and actively derail projects led by anyone other than them.

I don’t understand the headline: Why is it counter-intuitive to follow your intuition?

Sounds like an attempt to analyze the very thing the article claims should not be analyzed.

There must be a German word for what the article does with its title against its content.

A sign-language educated ape invented "waterbird" when it saw a duck. Why are English speakers looking elsewhere for compound words?

Eh, the more I think about it though the more I can think of times that "Going by my gut" when my brain and gut disagreed where my gut was wrong.

Like suppose you're talking to somebody over text and your gut says they're being an asshole, but your brain is rereading what they say and can't find anything specific to call out.

Which is correct?

Well, I've found that the gut is systematically unreliable in a number of situations... Are you in a bad mood for example? They say never go food shopping when you're hungry.

Not to say mind > gut, because that's just as stupid as saying gut > mind. The point is that there are dozens of variables (variables like mood) we need to learn in such evaluations, and generalizations can rarely be useful.

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