Turning Intuition into Managerial Simple Rules

This chapter addresses the limitation and proposes simple rules heuristics as natural vehicles to encode, use, test, refine, store, and share managerial knowledge that arises intuitively. It describes how managers naturally capture, test, store, and share their intuitions by turning them into simple rules. Managers create the simple rules heuristics by making sense of the unexpected failures. Normally, a sense-making process consists in scanning for pre-existing heuristics to explain and solve a puzzle. Simple rules heuristics, born from intuition and shaped through reflection, are often used exclusively by the individual manager. The framework aims to catalyze, during discussions, the three insights: what was the false assumption that led to the respective negative situation, what is true instead, and how should operationalize this new understanding. The chapter concludes by discussing how managerial intuition can be trained to purposefully produce the simple rules.