William Duggan, professor of the popular “Napolean’s Glance” course at the Columbia Business School, works to reconcile formal analytical methods of decision making with methods based on intuition. He calls this synthesis strategic intuition, and it’s based upon recent insight into brain function which suggests that the “analytical” and “creative” components of the brain work much more in concert than previously thought.

Perhaps the best way to understand this new model of the brain is to think of a giant warehouse. Your brain is the greatest inventory system on earth. It constantly takes in information, breaks it down, and puts in on its warehouse shelves—that’s analysis. Your brain then compares the new information with other items on other shelves. When it finds a match, it pulls those items off the shelves and puts them together in a flash of intuition. The combination of analysis and intuition becomes “creative insight,” which is “the ability to take existing pieces of information and combine them in novel ways that lead to greater understanding and suggest new behaviors and
responses.”

Duggan has used this insight to build up the strategic intuition framework as a way to quickly make decisions which nonetheless are built on a strong analytical foundation.

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