A practical framework for trusting your gut
In business, we often talk about the balance between data-driven decisions and relying on gut feeling. While numbers provide a solid foundation, intuition plays a crucial role that is difficult to quantify. I came across this excellent article by Phil McKinney, which provides a practical way to structure this process.
In his post, “The $200M Gut Check That Taught Me Intuition Isn’t Magic”, McKinney shares two contrasting personal stories: one where he dismissed Twitter’s potential and another where his intuition saved his company from a $200 million bad acquisition. The difference, he argues, was not luck but the application of what he now calls the ‘Practical Thinking Framework’.
He posits that what we call ‘gut feeling’ is often our brain detecting inconsistencies between the official story and the underlying reality. The key is not to follow that feeling blindly but to use it as a trigger for a systematic investigation.
Most innovation failures happen because people address the stated situation rather than the real situation.
The framework consists of three steps:
- Reality Recognition: See the situation for what it actually is, not what it is presented to be.
- Experience Application: Use your specific knowledge and past experiences, not generic best practices.
- Stakeholder Psychology Reading: Decode what people truly want, need, and fear, versus what they claim they need.
McKinney’s core argument is that good judgment does not come from having better intuition, but from having a better system to analyse it.
The leaders with amazing judgment haven’t been blessed with superior gut feelings—they’ve systematised them.
My take
What I find particularly valuable here is the idea that intuition should not be an endpoint, but a starting point for investigation. The framework provides the ‘how’—a structured way to validate that feeling, which is much more robust than either blindly trusting a hunch or ignoring it completely. It turns a vague feeling into a starting point for a practical analysis. This is a great bookmark for anyone who needs to make (high-stakes) decisions and wants to integrate their experience and intuition in a more structured way.
