CHAPTER 5

Honing Your Gut Feel and What You Bring to the Table

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening the ax.

—Abraham Lincoln

While getting my hair cut the other day, I noticed my hairdresser, Jennie, spending just a few seconds longer than expected, examining a bruise that I had developed on the right side of my head, right at the hairline. She innocently inquired, “Oh my, what happened?”

In the level of detail that I normally reserve for my hairdresser, I began to tell her, “I was making the bed in our guest bedroom, but one side of the bed is against the wall, so it’s never easy for me to get the fitted sheet on smoothly on that side. In any case, in trying to get the fitted sheet on I hit my head on part of the headboard and cursed a little too loudly . . .”

Jennie quickly lost interest in my explanation (and then pointed out a few strands of gray that were apparently new) and began to tell me about something she had heard from a friend of hers, also a hairdresser, who lives in Chicago.

“Did you know that hairdressers in Illinois are now required to attend domestic violence and sexual assault training?” she asked. Surprised, I inquired, “Are hairdressers more often victims of domestic violence than normal?”

They are not, it turns out. But Jennie told me that victims of domestic violence are more likely to open up to their hairdressers and share details when they have been assaulted. Because hairdressers and salon workers often have a unique ability to develop close relationships with their clients, it puts them in a rare position to ask questions when they notice something amiss, and even identify and offer help to victims.

Kristie Paskvan, founder of Chicago Says No More, a regional group in Illinois seeking to raise awareness about domestic violence, echoes, “When someone is essentially grooming you, you build a relationship with them. . . . It’s a special relationship. People open up.”

This gave activists an idea: mandate that hairdressers and licensed beauty professionals attend domestic violence and sexual assault training so they can learn to spot signs of abuse. The training, which started in 2017, isn’t intended to turn hairdressers into counselors or therapists—but it helps equip them so that they can recognize signs of domestic violence in their clients, serve as a supportive ear, and be prepared to share resources and refer them for support services* if needed. They aren’t expected to offer counseling, and they are not legally required to report abuse even if it is disclosed to them, but their help can go a long way toward prevention.

I love how inventive and resourceful it is. At its core, this program gives victims a way to be recognized, receive critical information about help that is available to them, and potentially prevent future episodes and save their lives. And it acknowledges that great ideas come from the ability to intuit the unexpected.

Gut Feel and the Exponential Function

These hairdressers ask questions, listen, make connections, and in so doing save lives. How? “We just use our intuition,” says my hairdresser, quite simply.

“Using your intuition” sounds simple, but it’s harder to pinpoint what that means. Some, especially decision scientists, say that intuition is completely irrational, and hundreds of years of science tell us that making a decision based on your gut is emotional and illogical and leads you to biased outcomes. In fact, I once received this feedback after I submitted my first paper on the role of gut feel in business to a scholarly outlet:

I find the entire paper to be problematic. Examining “gut feel”—something that is a slang word and should be reserved as such—is a complete waste of time and it was a waste of my time to read this work. We strive for theoretical impact in our field, and this paper is what I would define as atheoretical.

(This feedback was through a blind review process, if you couldn’t tell.)

Admittedly, I took that feedback to heart. I would have abandoned all my research on gut feel entirely if it hadn’t been for a couple of marvelous scholars at the University of Maryland, who, as luck would have it, invited me to present my work just days later. Timidly, as you can imagine, I gave the presentation. The response was something that I have never forgotten: immediately after my talk, they told me that my work was “cutting-edge” and daring and asked me to promise to never give up this line of research.*

My research on gut feel reconceptualized the way we think about intuition. I found that rather than subconscious or “irrational”—feeling without thinking, or “below the surface of consciousness,” as Malcolm Gladwell asserted in his 2005 book, Blink—what we describe as gut feeling is actually emotional and cognitive. There is feeling with thinking, and “going with our gut” need not imply uncertainty and flawed decisions.

Let me be more precise. Gut feel is what happens on the boundaries, at the extremes. When we are making a normal decision, one that is routine or conventional such as which washer and dryer to purchase or which job candidate is most qualified for a particular work task, we don’t need our gut feel, and in fact, sometimes our gut feel does lead us down erroneous paths. But when we need to make decisions that are anomalous and idiosyncratic, gut feel is invaluable.

To illustrate: I found that angel investors who use their gut feel are more likely to identify the home runs—the firms that will return them thirty times their investment or more. Their gut feel doesn’t help them on an overall, will-I-end-up-in-the-positive-or-in-the-negative kind of way, like someone who puts $200 into the stock market to try to make $220 at the end of the day. It helps them when they are willing to put in $200 and risk losing it all so that they might end up with $20,000.*

In baseball terms, your gut feel won’t help you achieve a higher batting average. You might end up with a .125, but you’re going to have achieved that through home runs, not singles or even doubles.

Gut feel is simply the combination of your own experiences and your unique ability to make connections in nonlinear, non-incremental, and hence unexpected and delightful ways.

As the physicist Albert Bartlett once said, “The greatest flaw of man is not being able to fathom the exponential function.” We tend to think linearly and are seldom able to conceive of a better way—the exponential function. Management scholars Robert Costigan and Kyle Brink describe linear thinking as rule based, superficial, logical, and easy to replicate. If linear thinking is about doing things one step at a time in a straight line, exponential thinking is about visualizing things in leaps and bounds and zigs and zags. When you think linearly, you underestimate what is actually possible. When you start thinking exponentially, in a way that cultivates your own personal experiences plus, it becomes one of the most powerful ways to hone and practice enriching.

Exponential thinking is behind innovative initiatives such as Illinois’s hairdresser training, but also mundane (yet revolutionary) products such as the disposable diaper. The diaper doesn’t need much of an introduction—essentially a type of “underwear” that absorbs and contains waste (known as the “insult” in diaper speak, I kid you not). Diapers are typically made either of cloth (layers of fabric such as cotton, hemp, bamboo, microfiber, or even plastic fibers such as PLA or PU, which can be washed and reused) or synthetic disposable materials.

Diapering can actually be traced back to 1590s England, but the disposable diaper only reached its modern form—and really started to enrich lives—in the 1940s. In 1946, a woman named Marion Donovan decided to use a shower curtain from her bathroom to create a plastic cover to go on the outside of a diaper. This plastic encapsulation (later named the “boater”) was the origin of the disposable diaper as we know it today.

The story goes that Vic Mills—who was a chemical engineer for Procter & Gamble and worked not only on the modern disposable diaper (what would later become the Pampers brand), but also on Pringles chips, Ivory soap, Duncan Hines cake mix, and a host of other products—came to the realization that stuffing the plastic that encapsulated diapers with wood chips increased the diapers’ absorbency. The diapers would not only hold the insult but also partly absorb it. These wood chips were sliced in a special way that allowed them to increase absorbency while taking up minimal space within the diaper—in fact, they were sliced in the same way that Pringles chips are still sliced to this day.

Then, in the 1980s, Carlyle Harmon, an American who was head of fabrics research for Johnson & Johnson, and Billy Gene Harper, who was working at Dow Chemical, discovered that they could stuff the plastic encapsulation with superabsorbent material from polymers—the same material that is now used to clean up oil spills.

Bricolage

Connections, linkages, Pringles, oil spills. Over the next few decades, the disposable diaper industry boomed—all predicated on the advancements and innovation made through the linkages that Vic Mills and Harper and Harmon identified. What Vic Mills, Harper and Harmon, and even Donovan did was engage in bricolage, the creation of something novel and exciting from the combination of our personal experience and our contexts. In art or music or literature, bricolage refers to construction or creation from a diverse range of available things—like a punk rock band reinterpreting classical music. In business, companies use things they have on hand, recombining them in nontraditional ways to produce valuable new products and innovation—like Airbnb did when it combined lodging services, accommodation seekers, smartphone and location technology, and payment-platform infrastructure.

My favorite way to understand bricolage, though, is probably through MacGyver, the TV series that I used to watch as a kid.* MacGyver (“Mac”), the show’s protagonist and a splendid, charming guy, is asked to solve all these problems in the world. In one episode, there might be a vial containing a deadly virus that is stolen from a science lab and MacGyver needs to recover it. In another, Mac and his team might be called upon to break up a massive counterfeiting ring. Regardless, it is some world-altering situation—he has to stop some bad guy who is trying to bomb the entire world, for example. So over the course of a one-hour episode, he has to use his intellect, knowledge, and his general collection of skills to do something. So he’ll be like, “Ooh, a paper clip . . . and look, a match and a wad of chewing gum . . .” He’ll assemble each of those random things in a clever way, and then in the last thirty seconds of the episode he’ll push a button, the bomb will fizzle and defuse, and the world will be saved.

That’s bricolage. It’s taking what you have on hand and putting it together in an innovative, improvisational way to do something really special. Companies that can do it are able to go beyond their resource limitations—their constraints—and challenge institutional barriers and limits to seemingly create something from nothing.

To make these kinds of linkages and reap the benefits of our personal experiences plus, sometimes the plus must come to us through formal training, like the type that Illinois hairdressers are receiving. And though successful bricolage doesn’t always come from the disadvantages, the pains, and the struggles that we’ve experienced, we have it within us to unearth the plus and the patterns through obstacles and adversity. When we do so, it can present a particularly valuable means to enrich. The rest of this chapter explains how we can hone our ability to see these opportunities.

Your Frustrations Are Others’ Frustrations

In 1989, Michael Eidson, an avid bicyclist, was competing in the Hotter ’N Hell 100 bike race in Wichita Falls, Texas. Annoyed with the water bottle holder on his bike and its location (which required him to awkwardly lean down to grab the bottle, open the bottle while drinking, close it up, and return it to the same inconvenient location), Eidson decided to jury-rig a solution. An EMT by trade, he went to his ambulance and found a sterile IV bag and tubing. He proceeded to fill the IV bag with water and then stuck it in a tube sock, pinning the sock to the back of his jersey. He then pulled the tube over his shoulder and secured it with a clothespin. This was the prototype of the CamelBak hydration pack. That’s bricolage in action.

Within months, the pack caught on. Eidson refined it into a compact, slim container that would feel light and stable and create minimal wind resistance. He began selling his invention, which allowed people, for the first time, to carry water on their backs, giving athletes a more convenient and efficient way of drinking during physical activities. No longer did athletes need to stop or even slow down to clumsily fumble with bottles for their water; they could simply grab the drink tube connected to the water reservoir inside the backpack (I was amused to discover that this water reservoir is called a bladder).

Nowadays, there are multiple types of hydration packs, designed specifically for all different types of activities, be it long-distance hikes, bike rides, or snowboarding. Packs differ in terms of size (small for short hikes to ones that are big enough for ultralight overnights), capacity (how much space you want for your water and your gear), fit (making sure the pack fits your body type, torso length, hip size, and so on), and even extra features like bite valve on-off switches and quick-connect tubing.

What Eidson did was address a personal pain point. Pain points are problems, plain and simple. And if you have a problem, many others probably do too. Inspired by both his EMT and cycling backgrounds, Eidson created a product that quickly became popular among cyclists*—as well as other types of athletes and outdoor enthusiasts. His product was even used by soldiers and troops in battle as a “personal hydration system” during the first and second Gulf Wars as well as the War in Afghanistan. US and foreign government contracts now make up more than 40 percent of CamelBak’s business.

Getting to the extraordinary, the exponential, is not as difficult as we might imagine. It is based on what we already know. Eidson knew cycling and he knew his ambulance supplies. The problem is that we often create barriers to thinking exponentially. We think about losing five pounds, and then ten pounds, and then more, rather than thinking about altering the way we think about health and wellness. We employ company strategies to achieve incremental growth—through products that are incrementally improved over prior ones, prices that are incrementally better, processes that are incrementally upgraded, or talent that is incrementally more experienced. Luckily, there are ways that we can practice and hone our ability to be extraordinary and to think exponentially, and in doing so truly enrich.

Inversion as the Antidote to Self-Doubt

Non-incremental, exponential thinking often occurs when we “flip the formula.” When we invert, or upend, or turn something upside down, it allows us to identify and remove obstacles to success. As a tool for developing our ability to enrich, it means approaching a situation from the opposite end of the natural starting point.

Returning to my work on gut feel, and taking my publishing woes as an example, most of us, me included, think one way about a problem: forward. The problem I faced, much as I didn’t want to admit it, was that even if my ideas surrounding the true value of gut feel were sound, I quite honestly had no idea how to write an academic paper. Academic writing, I discovered, was a whole different type of writing from what I had learned. Riddled with self-doubt, I reached out to a prominent scholar in my field and quite vulnerably admitted, “I’m worried that I’m a fluke and that I’ll get nothing but rejections.” He replied, “I had eighteen rejections before I had a single acceptance.” Now, I have come to learn he has never admitted this to anyone else, so I have no idea why he decided on that day to admit it to me. Nevertheless, that evening, as I thought about his admission, I inverted the problem I was facing. Rather than striving for paper acceptances, I decided to endeavor for rejections—eighteen, to be exact.

I decided that if this famous, prolific scholar had started his career with eighteen rejections, well, then why shouldn’t I? Learning something like this just takes time, and most people stop because they are paralyzed by failure. And sometimes it’s getting through the failure (and even coming to terms with it) that allows you to get to where you need to be. I decided I would give myself space to learn and improve. I would also aim for eighteen rejections before expecting a single acceptance.

I received fourteen rejections and four revise-and-resubmits (the closest to an acceptance that you can reach in my field, at which point you are invited to resubmit until it ultimately is rejected or accepted). I was exhausted, but I committed myself to keep going until I had a total of eighteen rejections (never mind the number of acceptances). When the next paper I submitted was not a rejection, I was surprised. But I was even more surprised by what I had tracked across all my submissions. Across those fourteen rejections and five acceptances, I discovered patterns. Patterns about certain papers that accounted for multiple rejections—patterns that helped me build a gut feel about which projects I should just kill early on and which projects to hunker down on and push through.* Patterns about particular coauthors who all but ensured rejection—patterns about whom I worked well with and whose skill sets complemented mine (and whose did not).*

Flipping the situation around and thinking backward allowed me to develop my strategy—the same strategy I use to this day. I work on only one paper in earnest at a time (unlike others who might have six or seven going at one time in an attempt to protect themselves from acceptance rates that can be 10 percent or lower) and try to convert each and every paper. If a paper doesn’t seem like it’s getting the traction I want, or the findings are not robust, I kill it off immediately. And so on.

Inverting one’s thinking means recognizing that while sometimes it’s good to start at the beginning, it can be more useful to start at the end. It means thinking about how you will manage and fulfill a big contract before getting the contract, so you can formulate the terms and the discussions.

For companies, it means thinking less in terms of problems in search of solutions and more in terms of solutions in search of problems.

3-D Printing and Solutions in Search of Problems

To demonstrate the difference between problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems to my students, I ask them to participate in a thought experiment. I explain what a 3-D printer is—something that can make pretty much anything*—and then give them the following parameters: with your 3-D printer, you can produce anything the size of a microwave or smaller; you can assume a one-dollar cost for the materials and manufacturing of any one item; and the final product is to be sold for a profit.

I tell them to brainstorm any idea that they can come up with for a commercial product. Try it yourself. Take a few minutes to come up with a list of your own.

After a period of time, we discuss their ideas—but not before I conspicuously place a sealed envelope at the front of the room and tell them that in the envelope I have written down what I predict they will come up with. I then write all their ideas on the board. Here are some of them:

• Car parts

• Jewelry

• Sunglasses

• Toys

• Musical instruments

• Medical and dental parts

• Replacement parts

• Architectural models and layouts

• Conference giveaways or souvenirs

When I open the envelope, they are shocked to discover that I have predicted at least 80 to 90 percent of the things they have come up with.

Why am I able to predict so many of the ideas that my students come up with? One reason, they say, is because I have taught this class many times. But another reason is because we predictably focus on obvious opportunities—those that are driven by problems in search of solutions.

I then tell them to see the 3-D printer not in terms of problems, but as a reversal: a solution in search of problems. After all, I explain, a 3-D printer can create items to address hordes of problems out there. Inverting their perspective so that they see the power of taking an existing solution—such as the 3-D printer—helps them more fully understand the nature of problems. What would happen if we didn’t start with an age-old problem but instead started with an innovative and unique solution and then retrofitted problems? Three-dimensional printing is an instantaneous, portable solution to manufacturing. When my students start with the unique assets of the solution, I get ideas like the following to solve more interesting problems:

Wire frames that can help prevent vineyard frost. Almost all winemakers struggle with vineyard frost. Freezing temperatures and frost pockets can severely damage vines and newly emerging buds. Most solutions are clumsy, like fans that try to pull warm air down to the vineyard floor, candles that give off enough heat to create air movement, wind machines, sprinklers, plows, and even helicopters. But it’s possible to print a wire frame that stretches across the floor of the vineyard, providing a mechanism for evenly dispersed temperature.

DigiPuppets. Kids are obsessed with touch screens—how can parents and teachers turn screens into tools for productive play? My students had an idea to create touch-screen finger puppets for kids. These students actually did start this company; they launched with two lovable characters (Honey Bunny and Zip the Zebra) and four educational apps that are able to bring those characters to life while teaching important skills and life lessons.

Seeing problems in a different, non-incremental way allowed for atypical, unexpected connections and ideas. Indeed, one way to develop our ability to think exponentially and non-incrementally is to hone our ability to see where connections exist. But equally important to develop is the ability to see where connections do not exist.

The Narrative and the Numbers

In every situation we encounter, every industry, every company, every individual, there’s a narrative and there are numbers. (Even when we are interacting with individuals, there are numbers and metrics, as we will see.) It’s just that they’re not always what they seem at first glance.

Let’s start by looking at the narrative and the numbers in a company setting: the discount airline industry, for example. There are players such as Ryanair, Spirit Airlines, and Southwest Airlines.

Some of you who have taken Ryanair before are probably groaning out loud right now. I am. My experiences with this airline were downright painful. The seats were small, cramped, hard. My knees literally hit the seat in front of me—and I measure in at a cool five feet five. I remember one flight that I took from London to Dublin in which I had forgotten to print my boarding pass in advance, so they charged me an extra twenty pounds. The boarding process was like herding cattle.

With Ryanair, you wouldn’t be surprised if they told you one day that you had to pay to use the on-board bathrooms. In fact, that is exactly what the airline experimented with a few years ago, charging people for the bathroom because the use of such a facility is a “luxury, not a necessity.”

Not too long ago, I also heard the news that Ryanair was considering a standing room only section of the airplane so that they could fit more people into each aircraft. They discussed sections with bicycle-seat-style contraptions that would keep you in a standing, upright position, with a bar that would come down (like an amusement park roller coaster’s) to keep you from jostling around while standing during the flight.

And then there’s Southwest. To me, Southwest, though it’s also a discount airline, has a markedly different feel. Flight attendants are helpful, happy, and downright hilarious. They make witty announcements, give food on the plane, and try to make flying an enjoyable experience. The boarding process is straightforward, and it’s still free to check bags.

Southwest and Ryanair, while they are both discount airlines, have two distinct narratives on being a discount airline. For Ryanair, it’s: Gosh darn it, when you are thinking about how to get from point A to point B and you want to do so as cheaply as possible, you’re going to remember that Ryanair is cheap. They want you to know that they are a discount airline. They’re cheap because they don’t waste on frills like comfortable seats. Bad press around standing room seats and paying to use the bathroom—that’s actually them purposely reminding you how very cheap they are. Ryanair encourages those articles about its no-frills experience. And when you want the cheapest flight possible, you happily pick them and then pat yourself on the back for remembering to print out your boarding pass in advance.

Southwest also reminds you that it is low-cost (though admittedly, not quite as low-cost as it once was). They also don’t have the frills, but they emphasize all the things they do for you that are free: making it enjoyable, letting you check bags, letting you change flights when they have available seats. And why shouldn’t they—these things cost them nothing, and hence cost you nothing. They remind you that they keep costs down but make your flight fun where it has no cost.

Their numbers? Nearly identical to Ryanair’s. The financials are similar; the narratives make all the difference.

Lots of these types of differences in narratives exist. How you tie them back to the numbers and vice versa is where you begin to gain an eye for enriching. Finding the holes, the red herrings, is about looking for alignment between the narrative and the numbers. It’s a great technique to look for areas where connections might not exist and where there may be incongruity. If it’s a new lightsaber umbrella, it’s about whether people will want it and whether they will pay for it—the narrative and the numbers. If it’s a company like Juicero, the numbers (Will people pay for it?) are certainly a concern when you consider the narrative around what the product actually does. Was the addressable market that Juicero had identified accurate? Was it really every household in the United States? Every single household? Their narrative just didn’t make sense. Their pricing didn’t make sense. And the two vis-à-vis each other also didn’t make sense.

The narrative and the numbers concept gives us a way to test our intuition about what might appear to fit but in fact is contradictory—in other words, it helps us fine-tune our gut feel about things that don’t seem quite right. It allows us to predict and catch flaws, of the sort those early medical specialists did when thinking about Theranos, and those reporters did with Juicero. It’s a technique that helps one to think smarter to gain that edge in ideas and innovation to enrich.

Making It All Make Sense

The narrative that Antje Danielson and Robin Chase, founders of the successful car-sharing company Zipcar, put forth was that people in large cities don’t need to own cars; they don’t need them on a daily basis. But people do find themselves needing a car on occasion: to get furniture at IKEA, to make a large grocery run, or to pick up a friend at the airport. So Zipcar allows access to one of their cars for the time period you need.

It’s a compelling narrative, one that was fairly solidly in place at the outset, when Danielson and Chase first started presenting their company to investors in January 2000. But what allowed them to become what they are today was not the narrative. It was how the narrative meshed (or didn’t mesh, as the case was) with the numbers they presented.

Looking at their earliest business plans, it was their numbers, and one number in particular, that a few astute individuals took note of. This number was their utilization rate. Zipcar had a proposed utilization rate of approximately 85 percent. This number presumably made sense—after all, Zipcar was using the rental car industry as a comparison, and most rental car companies had a similar utilization rate. But to those who thought a bit about it, an 85 percent utilization rate didn’t actually make sense. This number didn’t fit Zipcar’s narrative.

What did the 85 percent represent? Well, if we think about it in terms of the number of hours in a day, what is actually happening during those twenty-four hours? What is happening during all of those hours, including between, say, two a.m. and six a.m.?

How many people do you think are looking for a Zipcar during those hours? How many people are looking to make that large grocery run, or drive to IKEA, or use a car at all? At an 85 percent utilization rate, it would mean that some people still want a car between two a.m. and six a.m., and furthermore, that all other hours outside that two a.m. to six a.m. time period are close to full capacity—100 percent utilization.

It just didn’t make sense. For a rental car company, sure, you still pay for a longer-term rental car even when you’re not actually driving it.

But that number just didn’t align with Zipcar’s narrative about folks needing a car in urban areas. Their narrative wasn’t congruent with their numbers. Early investors passed and the company was almost never to be.

But the founders took note that their narrative wasn’t congruent with the numbers—and that their numbers weren’t congruent with the narrative. They understood that to make the company work, they needed to either change the narrative to fit the numbers, or tweak the numbers—even their growth projections, targets, and financials—to make them fit the narrative. And so they did, making shifts in how they thought about their fleet of cars, and in the reservation system, as well as adjusting their numbers and their financials. They finally arrived at a compelling case and the rest is history. Nowadays, you can find a Zipcar vehicle in almost every major city in the United States, as well as throughout Canada, France, Spain, and the UK.

It isn’t easy to develop an intuition for noticing things that don’t quite seem consistent. People are highly uncomfortable with what researchers call cognitive dissonance—when two things, be they beliefs, ideas, or values, feel contradictory. In fact, people find it so psychologically stressful that they reduce these feelings of uneasiness by actively avoiding or even changing the information to make it more harmonious. Psychologist Leon Festinger found that human beings are basically hardwired to not notice things like inconsistencies between a narrative and the surrounding numbers. They change part of their cognition to eliminate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance by ignoring things that seem amiss and exaggerating the positives.

But if we engage in a conscious effort to seek out incongruities, we create opportunities to enrich. Learn to notice what’s not there and to trust in what is there. Knowing the value you bring and trusting in your own perspective is the foundation of your edge. Then you can show others how you enrich. That’s where we’ll head next.