Your Gut Isn’t Guessing
For the better part of two decades, corporations have declared data the winner over intuition.
Data-driven leadership. Data-driven execution. Data-driven everything!
The gut — that signal you were born with, the one we were told to trust — was asked to stand down. Too subjective. Too hard to defend to the board. Too feelings-based. Too...human.
So we relied on models. Built dashboards. We let the numbers tell us what to do, who to hire, and where to invest.
AI is the next iteration of data in the driver's seat, generating more data than any human can meaningfully process. Faster than ever. From more sources than ever.
But with more confidence than it sometimes deserves.
Which means something else has to do the discerning. And that something is you.
Data and Intuition Aren’t At Odds
Many leaders wrongly frame intuition and data as opposites. You're either rigorous in your analysis, or you're going on a hunch.
But intuition isn't the absence of data. It's the distillation of it. It's your brain drawing on every pattern you've ever recognized, every room you've ever read, every decision that taught you something — synthesizing all of it, fast.
In a world where AI can generate a hundred data points in the time it takes to form a question, the skill that separates good leaders from excellent ones isn't analysis. It's discernment. Knowing which data to trust. Which recommendation to push back on. Which output looks right but feels wrong.
That's your intuition — borne from repetition and lived experience.
The leaders who will thrive in this AI-driven era won't be the ones who use AI to think for them. They're the ones who use AI to think with them — and who trust themselves enough to know the difference. To be an excellent human in the loop, you have to actually trust your humanness.
Your read. Your pattern recognition. Your lived experience as the context that no model has ever had access to.
The Leadership Shift
1. Treat your intuition as a data source. Before you fire up your model, write down what you already know. What's working. What isn't. What you're sensing. Then run your analysis. Notice where your thinking aligns — and where it doesn't.
2. Ask better questions of your data. AI will give you answers. Your job is to challenge them. What context is missing? What's the model not accounting for? What's the people impact of executing on that output? The quality of your discernment is the quality of your judgment.
3. Audit where you've been deferring decisions. Take inventory of decisions you've been sitting on. Ask yourself honestly: am I gathering more data — or am I waiting for someone or something to tell me it's okay? Those are different problems with different solutions.
4. Track your hits. Start a running list of times your instinct was right when the data was unclear, absent, or pointing somewhere else. You have more evidence of your own discernment than you think. You've just never organized it.
Leaders who trust their gut aren't reckless. They're not anti-data either. They use every tool available — including themselves.
Your gut isn't a liability. It's your secret weapon to better.
To better,
— Jess