“Trust Your Gut”
Picks the Most Familiar Answer and Misses the Full Problem.

Customer orders keep shipping late, so you ask the three leads involved why. The operations lead says the warehouse is short of people. The finance lead says the new credit check holds up large orders. The sales lead says your biggest customers now send fewer, larger orders.

You go with your gut and back the operations lead, because short staffing matches what you have seen before. You approve two more warehouse hires. At the next review, the finance lead brings more numbers on the credit check, and the sales lead brings a chart of order sizes. By spring, the orders still ship late.

Leaders are told to trust their gut and act on their experience, even before they can say why. A ship’s captain or a factory’s general manager meets the same situations again and again. With years to learn them, their gut feelings are likely to be well trained.

Teams that run on gut feeling can treat the explanation that feels right as the true one. The leads who were passed over then spend their attention arguing for their own explanations. That arguing is cognitive load: mental effort that does nothing to fix the late orders.

I could not have backed the operations lead on a feeling. I have alexithymia, a trait that is common among autistic people like me. I can tell I am feeling something, but often not what, and my gut can barely tell me whether I am happy or sad.

What I trust is my reasoning, and with Claude I can now test it about as fast as most people go with their gut. More than once, earlier in my career, I took on a problem that ran across operations and accounting, each with its own experts. I went through each expert’s reasons and looked for what they had in common. That is where I found the real cause.

Most of the time, I find that each expert is right about one part of the problem and thinks it is the whole problem. Each of them tends to see the part closest to their own work, and may not notice why they see that part.

Before a big decision that several people see differently, ask each of them two questions, one to one or in writing:

“What do you think is causing this problem, and why?”

“What part of your work does this problem put at risk?”

When people answer on their own, nobody has to defend their view in front of the others. Once every answer is in, ask yourself a third question, and decide from your answer:

“What do all of their reasons have in common?”

Your own gut feeling about the cause goes on the page too, as one more answer.

AI can put everyone’s answers side by side for you. You still answer the third question yourself. That split comes from my AI Cognitive Strategy Matrix, the framework I use to decide which parts of a decision AI takes on.

Back on the late orders, before you approved the hires, your notes might read:

So the decision in front of you becomes how to handle larger orders. Getting that right protects what each lead said was at risk: shipping on time, getting paid and keeping your biggest customers.

With that decision made, the warehouse is set up for large orders by summer. The credit check clears your biggest customers before their orders arrive. The three leads now bring that work to each review together.

For each person below, say what their view is based on and what they take for granted. Then show where the people agree. Also show where they only seem to disagree because each describes a different part of the problem. Next, name what all of their reasons have in common, and write it as a question I can check with the people involved. Use only what each person wrote. Where an answer gives no reason, or does not say what is at risk, list what is missing as a question for that person. Do not fill it in yourself. Do not pick a view or rank the people, because I will decide. The answers, by role: [paste here]