In our upcoming May issue of SME Insight, columnist Wilson Ng talks about gut feel versus scientific management. Definitely an interesting topic! Wilson notes that many business people rely on their gut feel in making decisions.

But where does gut feel come from?

Gut feel, hunches, intuition… this actually comes from prior knowledge that people do not consciously know that they have.

Imagine a machine operator who “knows” when there’s something wrong with his machine just by listening to the sound of its motor. That kind of knowledge did not just happen on the first day in the job. Chances are that the operator must have been running the machine day in and day out for years. Long enough for him to master the nuances of the machine.

Same thing with management. Not everyone can rely on gut feel… because not everyone will have it. You get a gut feel only from experience and from being a veteran in the management game.

This doesn’t mean that a newbie manager won’t have gut feel though. Newbies can rely on patterns that they would have accumulated in their lives. For instance, if they loved playing basketball and have played it all their lives, they would probably have accumulated subconscious knowlege about how to read who the team players are and who are not. And this kind of reading ends up being applied when they “read” the people in their organization.

In short, gut feel comes down to experience. The more experience a person has–whether on the job or not–the more reliable his or her gut feel would be. But only if the situation matches his or her depth of experience. And when it does, prepare to be amazed.

In his bestselling book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell notes how experts “know” things in a split second just by looking at something. They can’t explain why they know it, but chances are that they are right. And this is because they have already accumulated so much knowledge about their field of expertise that their conclusions can just pop out.

Perhaps this is the key reason why corporate Boards put a premium on seniority and experience for their members.