Human intuition can be astonishingly good, especially after it's improved by experience.

Savvy poker players are so good at reading their opponents' cards and bluffs that they seem to have x-ray vision. Firefighters can, under extreme duress, anticipate how flames will spread through a building. And nurses in neonatal ICUs can tell if a baby has a dangerous infection even before blood test results come back from the lab.

The lexicon to describe this phenomenon is mostly mystical in nature. Poker players have a sixth sense; firefighters feel the blaze's intentions; Nurses just know what seems like an infection. They can't even tell us what data and cues they use to make their excellent judgments; their intuition springs from a deep place that can't be easily examined.

Examples like these give many people the impression that human intuition is generally reliable, and that we should rely more on the decisions and predictions that come to us in the blink of an eye.

This is deeply misguided advice. We should rely less, not more, on intuition.

Read the entire article here:

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/mcafee/2010/01/the-future-of-decision-making.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE 

Andrew McAfee is principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of Enterprise 2.0.