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The Exceptional Manager

Chapter 9: Making Intelligent Decisions

Balancing Intuition and Analysis?

One issue in this area that AIM research has considered further relates to the on-going debate about whether we need to recognise that there should be a genuine balance between intuition and analysis in decision making (see Dane and Pratt, 'Exploring Intuition And Its Role In Managerial Decision Making', Academy of Management Review, 2007, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 33-54). In particular the need to be clearer how far we talking about balance, particularly considering the details of the context compared with some underlying assumption about the essential superiority of the rational analytic model. Hence the underlying question as to the validity of the Dual Process model (Hodgkinson Gerard P., Langan-Fox, Janice, and Eugene Sadler-Smith 'Intuition: A Fundamental Bridging Construct in the Behavioural Sciences', British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming). We have also been interested to consider how far these questions can be linked to issues of management understanding being seen more as folk wisdom and the nature of so-called defeasible inferences in management decision making contexts (Wensley, AIM).

The role of practical judgement (phronesis) as a critical aspect of strategic decision making extends current managerial and organizational cognitive views and opens up the importance of choice, not between alternatives alone, but between different value systems, guiding the ways in which purposefulness of decisions are defined. (see Antonacopoulou, E.P., 'Management Learning'. In Clegg, S., and Bailey, J., International Encyclopaedia of Organization Studies, Sage, forthcoming).

For an overall review of a number of the critical issues in this area see the first chapter in Hodgkinson and Starbuck, The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Decision Making. For a further discussion on one particular set of benefits of causal mapping see Clarkson et al., AIM.

A range of research in AIM has considered the role and impact of various tools and interventions such as strategic reviews (see Schwarz and Balogun, AIM), the use of strategic tools (see Jarzabkowski and Kaplan, AIM), and strategy workshops (AIM).