On Leadership & Intuition

A while back, Jamie Flinchbaugh invited me onto his podcast, People Solve Problems, to talk about leadership and intuition. You can listen to the conversation here.

I'm an engineer by training. I was taught — and for years I believed — that good leadership meant good analysis: gather the data, frame the decision, choose. And that model works, right up until the moment it doesn't. The moments that shaped my career weren't the well-framed decisions in well-prepared rooms. They were the half-second reads. The teammate who said "doing well" with their energy a half degree off. The pause before someone almost told me the truth.

That's what Jamie and I dug into: intuition not as the opposite of rigor, but as a different kind of data — pattern recognition earned over decades, arriving faster than analysis can.

Listening back now, there's one thing I'd add. We're living in a moment when machine intelligence is getting cheaper by the quarter. Analysis, synthesis, first drafts — increasingly abundant. Which means the scarce asset is inverting. The half-second read on a human being, the earned instinct about when to push and when to sit quietly with someone — that's the part of leadership no model produces. The more intelligence we automate, the more the human read is worth.

I coach from a simple conviction Jamie drew out of me on that episode: people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Intuition, mostly, is the discipline of remembering that in real time.

What's a moment your gut caught something the data missed?