J. Timothy King’s Blog

Intuition Power

Kathy Sierra’s post on Creating Passionate Users reminds me of the story of how Andy Kirk saved a team of firefighters.

(This story was featured on the BBC documentary The Human Mind and How to Make the Most of It, starring Robert Winston, and may also be in his book of the same name.)

The day was October 5, 2001. Andy Kirk, firefighter for over 20 years, sent his crew into the burning building. They seemed to be winning over the fire. Then Andy suddenly felt he had to get his team out of there. He didn’t know why, but he had to get them out of there. Now! He insisted they withdraw. So they did.

Then, the building exploded.

Afterward, investigators pieced together what had happened. It was a backdraft, a rare event that occurs after a fire in an enclosed space continues burning with little oxygen. In this case, there were subtle signs of imminent backdraft. The fire was too quiet. The smoke was the wrong color. The building sucked in fresh air through the open doors. Andy didn’t consciously put these pieces together, but he had been in enough fires. His mind did it for him. This is intuition.

The most intuitive among us have the most trouble explaining things in concrete terms that are easy to understand. Usually, your team needs to understand in order to be on board. Andy was in a position where he could insist his team do as he say. Most of us are not in such a position.

Andy gambled with his intuition, and it paid off. We can’t make the same gamble. Even if we could make demands, the payoff would probably take too long for anyone to notice. Meanwhile, our constituents would only listen for a short time, and then they would start to distrust us. That’s leadership poison.

With practice, however, it’s possible to learn to explain your intuition, piece by piece, as the steps we can take to get to the goal. The goal itself is the product of your intuition. This is vision, the ability to see Canaan at the end of the desert, the ability to believe in it so powerfully that you can get others to look to the same direction.

So do not fret. Glibness may win the day, but its effect is only transitory. Glibness does not a leader make. As James Kouzes and Barry Posner point out in their book The Leadership Challenge, to make a leader, you need vision.

-TimK