When business leaders talk about intuition, they usually mean something specific: a fast, experience-based sense that a deal is right, a hire is wrong, or a strategy will hold — without being able to fully say why they know. In terms of the three layers of intuition an earlier piece in this series set out, most of what gets discussed in business is the first: fast pattern intuition, built on years of accumulated experience, feedback, and refinement.
Some of the more interesting conversations touch the second layer — deep insight — where a leader sees something genuinely new: a market that does not yet exist, a product nobody asked for, a pivot that defies the data. These are rarer, and often filed under "visionary genius." The third layer, guidance that seems to come from beyond personal experience, is almost never discussed in business. And yet, listen carefully to how some of the most successful leaders describe their own process, and you hear something much closer to that deeper layer than to simple pattern recognition.
This piece looks at what the research says about how intuition actually operates in business, who relies on it most, how it can be developed, and why — as AI rapidly commoditises data analysis — it may be the most important leadership capacity to invest in.
How do leaders actually make decisions?
The gap between how business culture says decisions should be made and how they are actually made is striking.
A PwC survey of over 1,100 senior executives found that UK leaders ranked intuition and experience as the number one factor in major decisions at 41%, ahead of advice from others at 31% and data and analytics at only 23%. A separate PwC study found that 59% of decision-makers say the analysis they rely on is primarily human judgement rather than machine algorithms.
A KPMG CEO Outlook study of CEOs at large companies found that only 33% have a high level of trust in their data and analytics — and 67% reported putting their own intuition over data-driven insights in the preceding three years.
An MIT Sloan Management Review survey of 3,225 executives found that 38% said their decisions are more rooted in intuition than data, while only 27% leaned primarily on data.
A Harvard Business Review analysis reported that a large share of executives rely on intuition for critical decisions, and that in a study of 36 major CEO decisions, gut feel was a major factor in 85% of them.
The picture is consistent: intuition is not a marginal factor in executive decision-making — it is central, and the higher the stakes, the more leaders lean on it.
Why do more senior leaders rely on intuition more?
This is one of the more consistent findings in the research. MIT Sloan Management Review reports that senior executives at the highest level make significantly more intuitive decisions than those at middle and lower levels — and that it takes roughly ten years of domain-specific experience to develop the kind of gut feel that supports good intuitive judgement.
A study by Liebowitz and colleagues, drawing on 172 respondents of whom 65% were C-suite, found the same pattern: more experienced executives use what the researchers call "inferential intuition" — judgements that were once analytical but have become intuitive through practice. Less experienced employees, by contrast, prefer data and emotional intelligence as their primary guides.
Gary Klein's recognition-primed decision model reinforces this from cognitive science. His research on firefighters, military commanders, and other high-stakes experts found that seasoned decision-makers do not compare multiple options analytically. They intuitively match the situation to prototypes formed over years, then mentally simulate a single course of action. The vast majority of expert decisions are made this way.
What do the most successful leaders actually say?
What makes the data more interesting is how openly some of the world's most successful leaders speak about this.
"Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion." — Steve Jobs
"All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts — not analysis. If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart." — Jeff Bezos
"I've trusted the still, small voice of intuition my entire life. And the only time I've made mistakes is when I didn't listen." — Oprah Winfrey
Notice the language. Bezos does not say "pattern recognition" — he says heart. Oprah does not say "unconscious expertise" — she says a still, small voice. Jobs describes something more powerful than intellect. Several of these descriptions sound less like fast pattern intuition and more like the second or third layer: a knowing that feels like it comes from somewhere deeper than accumulated experience.
How do leaders develop intuition?
There is surprisingly little formal infrastructure for developing intuition in business education. An Academy of Management paper from 2022 noted a paucity of guidance for managers and educators on how to train it. But several approaches stand out consistently from the research and practice literature.
Depth and diversity of experience. The most cited factor. The richer and more varied your exposure to different challenges, industries, cultures, and roles, the larger the mental reference library that intuition draws from.
Reflective practice. Regularly reviewing past decisions, good and bad, to calibrate the inner compass. Executive journaling, after-action reviews, and structured self-reflection are the common forms.
Seeking real feedback. Eugene Sadler-Smith, a leading researcher on executive intuition, emphasises that intuition without feedback does not improve — but with high-quality feedback it progressively calibrates. He recommends benchmarking your "batting average" and deliberately challenging your gut through structured devil's advocacy.
Firsthand engagement. Staying connected to customers, employees, and front-line realities rather than relying only on reports. Unfiltered, sensory-rich input is what intuition feeds on.
Mindfulness and meditation. Companies including Google, General Mills, and LinkedIn have run mindfulness programmes for their leadership teams, with reported gains in decision quality and stress management. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Psychology identified attention, awareness, and authenticity as the three core capacities mindfulness develops in leaders.
What do wisdom traditions add to this?
It is worth pausing to note that most of these practices — reflection, immersion, feedback, quieting the mind — are essentially secular versions of what contemplative traditions have taught for millennia. Meditation across Buddhist, Vedantic, Sufi, Taoist, and Christian mystical lineages shares the same basic structure: quiet the reactive mind, refine inner perception, and learn to listen to what becomes available in that stillness.
What these traditions add is the claim that such practices do not only sharpen pattern recognition or reduce cognitive noise. They open access to a qualitatively different layer of knowing — what an earlier piece called transpersonal intuition — where the signal is no longer just your own compressed experience, but something larger. Contemporary science has no tools to confirm or refute that claim. But it is striking how often the language of the most successful leaders sounds more like this deeper layer than like the fast pattern recognition business research usually studies.
Why will intuition matter more, not less, as AI advances?
We are entering a period where the first layer of intuition — fast pattern recognition over large datasets — is being rapidly commoditised by AI. Machine learning can process more data and surface more patterns than any human team, and it is improving exponentially.
This is often framed as a threat to human decision-making. It may be the opposite: an invitation to deliberately practise the deeper layers.
AI handles the knowable. It excels at calculating risk where probabilities can be derived from historical data. But most high-stakes strategic decisions involve genuine uncertainty — where the future is not a statistical extension of the past. This is Gigerenzer's crucial distinction: risk is calculable, uncertainty is not. And uncertainty is where intuition thrives.
More data has not made decisions easier; in many cases it has made them harder. When leaders feel stressed by decisions and do not fully trust their data, the bottleneck is not information. It is sense-making.
So the leader's role is shifting. As AI takes over data processing and analytical pattern recognition, the leader moves from being the main information source to being the primary sense-maker. The question shifts from "what does the data say?" to "what does this mean — and what should we do about it?"
Human intuition senses what is emerging before the data catches up. It spots opportunities that have not hit the data yet, navigates incomplete or conflicting information where there is no clear answer, and reads the implicit and intangible — morale, culture, the emotional undertone of a negotiation — that no algorithm currently captures. And the combination outperforms either alone: McKinsey has argued that decision quality improves when data-driven insight and human judgement are integrated rather than used in isolation.
Why is intuition the real differentiator now?
If AI can do fast pattern recognition better, faster, and cheaper than any human, then fast pattern intuition — impressive as it is — is no longer the edge.
The edge moves to the layers AI cannot replicate: the capacity to see something genuinely new, and the capacity to sense direction from a place that goes beyond personal experience and accumulated data. These are the layers the most exceptional leaders have always operated from, often without naming it — and the layers wisdom traditions have been deliberately cultivating for millennia.
In a business environment defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity — where data is abundant but clarity is scarce — the leaders who thrive will not be the ones with the best analytics. They will be the ones who have developed their capacity to know what the analytics cannot tell them.
The question is not whether intuition matters in business; the data on that is clear. The question is whether we are willing to take its development as seriously as any other core leadership capability — and whether we are curious enough to explore what becomes available when we do. The next piece in this series looks at exactly how to cultivate it, and why the gateway to deeper intuition is not in the mind but in the nervous system.
Sources & further reading
PwC. Big Decisions: making the right calls in a data-driven world. PwC UK / The Economist Intelligence Unit. https://www.pwc.co.uk/data-analytics/big-decisions/big-decisions-infographics.pdf
PwC. Data-driven: What students say about big decisions and the view of decision-makers. https://www.pwc.com/jp/ja/knowledge/thoughtleadership/big-decision-survey/assets/pdf/view-of-decisions.pdf
KPMG. CEO Outlook — trust in data and analytics. Reported via Inside AI News (2016). https://insideainews.com/2016/07/15/just-one-third-of-ceos-trust-their-data-and-analytics-kpmg-survey-finds/
MIT Sloan Management Review. Balancing Data and Intuition in Strategic Decision-Making (survey of 3,225 executives). https://sloanreview.mit.edu/video/balance-data-and-intuition-to-make-strategic-decisions/
MIT Sloan Management Review. Intuitive Decision-Making. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/intuitive-decision-making/
Harvard Business Review. Decoding Intuition for More Effective Decision-Making (2011). https://hbr.org/2011/08/decoding-intuition-for-more-ef
Klein, G. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (recognition-primed decision model). MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534291/sources-of-power/
Liebowitz, J. (ed.). Bursting the Big Data Bubble: The Case for Intuition-Based Decision Making. CRC Press / Taylor & Francis. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.1201/9780429298097/developing-informed-intuition-decision-making-jay-liebowitz
Sadler-Smith, E. The Intuitive Executive: Understanding and Applying 'Gut Feel' in Decision-Making. Discussed in Chief Executive. https://chiefexecutive.net/new-research-says-ceos-should-follow-their-intuition/
Doornich, J. B. & Lynch, M. P. J. The mindful leader: a review of leadership qualities derived from mindfulness meditation. Frontiers in Psychology (2024). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1322507
Academy of Management. How to Develop Intuition in Management Education and Development (2022). https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2022.12698abstract
Gigerenzer, G. Reckoning with Risk / risk vs uncertainty. Commentary, QJM (via UCL). https://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/sites/medical-education/files/2003-QJM-Gigerenzer-ReckoningWithRisk.pdf
McKinsey & Company. Three keys to faster, better decisions. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/three-keys-to-faster-better-decisions
Frequently Asked Questions
How important is intuition in executive decision-making?
It is central rather than marginal. Surveys of senior leaders consistently show intuition ranking at or near the top of the factors behind major decisions — often ahead of data and analytics. Studies from PwC, KPMG, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Harvard Business Review all point the same way: the higher the stakes, the more leaders rely on intuitive judgement.
Why do more senior leaders rely on intuition more than junior ones?
Research from MIT Sloan Management Review finds that top executives make significantly more intuitive decisions than middle managers, and that it takes roughly ten years of domain-specific experience to build reliable gut feel. Experienced leaders draw on a large, well-calibrated library of patterns, so judgements that were once analytical have become intuitive through years of practice and feedback.
Can intuition actually be developed, or are you born with it?
It can be developed. The most cited factors are depth and diversity of experience, reflective review of past decisions, seeking high-quality feedback to calibrate your judgement, staying in firsthand contact with front-line realities, and practices such as mindfulness and meditation. Intuition without feedback does not improve, but with good feedback it steadily sharpens.
Will AI make human intuition obsolete?
The opposite is more likely. AI is rapidly commoditising fast pattern recognition over large datasets — the calculable, risk-based layer of decision-making. But most high-stakes strategic decisions involve genuine uncertainty, where the future is not a statistical extension of the past. That is precisely where human intuition, and the leader’s role as sense-maker, becomes the real differentiator.
What kinds of decisions is intuition best suited for?
Intuition is most valuable under uncertainty, complexity, and time pressure — situations with incomplete or conflicting information and no clear analytical answer. It senses what is emerging before the data confirms it, and reads intangible factors like morale, culture, and the emotional undertone of a negotiation that algorithms do not capture. For calculable, data-rich problems, analysis remains the better tool.