The Affect Network, or in the parlance of brain anatomy—the Limbic System—is the emotional system of the body. Events that take place in the world, as well as thoughts in the mind trigger a whole host of internal biochemical chain-reactions within the body that ultimately lead to physical outcomes such as alterations in heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature. And that biochemical and physical process is what emotion is comprised of. Heart rate, for example, goes down to normal levels when experiences and thoughts are happy, and up when they are anxiety producing. This is important to understand for a wide variety of reasons. But for our purposes here, let’s apply it to the experience of ‘gut instinct,’ and leveraging this internal compass for business success.
It’s important to start with a step back, to look at how memory and learning work, because memories and learnings stored in the brain are the elements that trigger emotions. Over a lifetime, people continuously build up a bank of memories that are categorized by association (i.e., this experience is like that experience and that experience is like this experience). Each time we have an experience in the world, the mind automatically compares that experience to the bank of memories stored and either finds a match—this is like that—or finds that experience to be a novel one.
Waytz and Mason, in their HBR article, use an example of someone having a powerfully bad encounter with a habanero pepper that burnt the mouth and left an indelible lesson: habanero peppers are bad. “The point is,” say the authors, “you don’t have to do any rational analysis to decide whether to eat habaneros the next time they’re presented to you.” You now have a fast track to decision-making in which you don’t need any further data to analyze. I would add to this example that the mind, even at an unconscious level, can generalize to other kinds of peppers, concluding that all peppers are bad. In this scenario, the individual may be unnecessarily limiting their eating experience, because all peppers are not hot, or not as hot as the habanero. In some cases, the associations made by the brain are unnecessarily generalized.
Now, let’s round this back to leveraging the gut instinct by imagining a professional with a big, high risk decision to make, the outcome of which will have significant impact on the business, either positive or negative, depending on the outcome. And the decision maker is a seasoned professional with great depth of experience, who has had a large team analyzing data gathered to facilitate making the big decision. Let’s say the decision is around whether to invest significantly in a new partnership. All of the due diligence data looks good, pointing to a ‘go’ as opposed to a ‘no go’ decision. Yet, the decision maker is uncharacteristically plagued with sleepless nights over this decision, waking up frequently in the middle of the night with a pit of soreness in her gut. She knows that all of the data point to a positive outcome, but she just can’t rid herself of a ‘feeling’ of doom and gloom. What should she do? Because she is operating within a business culture that relies on data and logic at the expense of ‘gut feelings,’ she procrastinates on bringing her concerns to her boss.
The point of this example is that the negative feeling this professional has about her situation should be deemed important, because she has a wealth of experience that the inner mind has to draw upon to set off alarm signals, even if she is not consciously aware of what is triggering her concerns. This is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard or dismiss data and rational input. But the subjective, internal knowing could be at the very crux of what this company needs to pay attention to.
‘Gut feelings’ are by no means always accurate. Take the example above in which learning and associations have led to the belief that all peppers are bad. On this very small scale, this can lead to a life of unnecessarily bland eating. Associations can be distorted, as well, all the way up to the scale of a critical business decision. Having said that, more business are embracing the full scope of inputs, including emotions, to guide their judgments and decisions and reaping excellent returns.