Profit: Use instinct or information?

As a result of this column MPI Providers and Suppliers will:

Gain important information from very limited sources to make good decisions.
Let “gut instinct” guide you better than years of studies and consultant’s reports?
Trust the supercomputer carried between your ears, knowing the more experiences it’s had, the more reliable your judgment is likely to be.

Are the best decision makers those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating? According to the U.S. Commerce Department, depending on the industry, 70 to 80% of all major new product or service launches fail. If extensive information is critical, why, after market research, focus groups and demographic studies is the failure rate so high?

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point says, “We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we’re always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed in us again and again: haste makes waste; look before you leap; stop and think. But I don’t think this is true.”

Have you ever fallen in love with a great idea and thought your customer base would feel the same? When the Edsel automobile was introduced, Henry Ford felt that way. It turned out to be one the worst product introductions in automotive history. In today’s information society, it is almost possible to collect enough data to make any proposition seem plausible, and that’s exactly what meeting industry leaders have to be careful to avoid.

The longer you’re in your field, and the more experience you gather, the more reliable your intuition will prove to be.
The more experiences that supercomputer carried between your ears has had, the more reliable your judgment is likely to be.

Government officials and anthropologists now believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the five indigenous tribes on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and the Nicobar islands from the tsunami that hit the Asian coastline Dec. 26, 2004.

Interestingly enough, all of our sophisticated satellites and highly calibrated scientific equipment provided almost no warning whatsoever. Ashish Roy, a local environmentalist and lawyer noted, “They can smell the wind. They can gauge the depth of the sea with the sound of their oars. They have a sixth sense which we don’t possess.”

As with the indigenous tribes and the tsunami, MPI Suppliers and Providers along with your experienced people may have a “sixth sense” about your enterprise that allows you to make far better decisions than can be made by gathering and analyzing extensive information.

Of course intuition can prove to be wrong, and we hear of sad cases involving police, war and other life or death situations where innocent people have been harmed.
We often make poor decisions when under significant stress. Fear and chaos inhibit our intelligent, intuitive self from making right decisions.

However, acknowledging our prejudices and other situational aspects can assist us in making better intuitive decisions. We all have a tendency to assume that everyone embraces the same definition of quality that we do, and that their idea of excellence is the same as ours.

In business and in life we have become too concerned about making a mistake and the mantra of “do it right the first time, or don’t do it at all” is too deeply ingrained in our culture.

While gathering information and extensive deliberation may protect meeting industry professionals from the criticism of a bad decision, there is little evidence that widespread information assemblage followed by thorough and time-consuming analysis, leads to fewer mistakes. Instinct or information…in the meeting industry, it’s a concept

This article is provided by Joe Murtagh, “The DreamSpeaker” www.TheDreamSpeaker.com an MPI member and an expert at solving industry challenges. For keynotes, workshops, consulting and questions or a free report on The 3 Most Common Mistakes MPI Members Make email Joe Murtagh at Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com or call 800-239-0058.

If you enjoyed this column you’ll love our Books (click here) and Training Programs (click here). Each is filled with hundreds of leading edge profit enhancing ideas from the best business thinkers in the world.This is one of over 300 columns published and part of the reason why The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have called The DreamSpeaker^TM about Business Planning Issues.

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