What We Know About Leading With Intuition

ADI IGNATIUS: I am Adi Ignatius.

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so Alison, when it comes to making decisions, do you consider yourself data-driven or do you just kind of go with your gut?

ALISON BEARD: A hundred percent my gut, and I know that’s a very old-school way of doing things, but when I’m deciding on an article to commission, or a guest I want to have on this show, or a magazine cover, I definitely think to myself, “Does this feel right? Do I know it’s going to work in my heart of hearts?” And I trust that instinct.

ADI IGNATIUS: Well, I interviewed Barry Diller on this show not long ago, and he says he makes every decision by his gut, and if you follow any other path, you’re going to make a mistake. So I mean, to be honest, I set up kind of a false dichotomy with that question between using data and information on the one hand versus using intuition and emotion. So today we’re going to talk about intuition and following your gut, but our guest, Laura Huang, doesn’t make that kind of hard and fast distinction. She says that, “Actually when we’re making a decision with intuition, it is a combination of, it is informed by our previous experience, the external data that we’ve gathered, even if we don’t realize it at the time. So there is data even inside what feels like gut decisions.”

ALISON BEARD: That does make me feel better because I think we live in this age of data and analytics, and sometimes I feel bad that I’m not looking at the spreadsheets to make my decisions. But I think that what you’re saying makes sense. I am using decades of experience in journalism, as you do as well, to make those calls on what we think is good editorial content.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, and look, maybe that’s the secret of success for people in leadership positions, that they have an ability to rely on their gut, but that is informed by years of experience, and skills, and knowledge. So today we’re going to talk about how that works. There is some real science here today. It’s not just a wishy-washy concept.

We will be speaking with Laura Huang, who’s a professor and associate dean at Northeastern University. She wrote the book, You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition. Here is our conversation.

All right, so I want to ask, you’re deep in the field of studying what it means to rely on your instincts, to have a gut feel for something. What made you decide even to go into that field?

LAURA HUANG: I came from a very technical background. I was an engineer, was designing lots of new products. And what I realized very quickly on was that it was never the best product that won. There was always other factors that led to whether or not that product was being accepted, whether it was being adopted, whether it was being put to the next level of testing, all sorts of things along the way. There were all these subtle cues, and factors, and perceptions, and even intuitions that dictated whether something went forward or not. Because I came from a technical background, I thought that there was a way that we could quantify that. And so a lot of my earliest research was around how do we quantify the unquantifiable – something like our intuition or our gut feel?

ADI IGNATIUS: I know that one of the first bits of research you did was with early stage investors, I guess, who went with their gut. Talk about what you found in that.

LAURA HUANG: Yeah, so I found that a lot of times when I was asking investors, “Well, how did you decide to invest in XYZ company? Or how did you decide to pass on ABC company?” That 100% of the people I spoke with, they would talk about the data, the financials, the hard sort of factors, but they would also talk about their gut feel. They would start to say things like, “Yeah, and then I just had this feeling, I just knew that I had to invest in this person,” or, “I had this feeling that there was something that was off about this idea.” And so there was an element of that that was blended throughout any of the decisions that they were making.

I even had one investor, actually, when I was interviewing him, I said, “How do you make your decisions?” And he said, “Oh, I rub my tummy, I just rub my belly.” And so that kind of illustrates in some way that factor, that we have this gut feel around the decisions that we make.

ADI IGNATIUS: Now, obviously don’t try that at home. So you’re getting a sense of the role of the gut feel in making some of these decisions. It’s generally estimated that 75% of, let’s say VC investments never return a profit to their investors. Does that mean that three-quarters of these gut decisions are failures?

LAURA HUANG: So you’re correct in the sense that when investors are making decisions, there’s absolutely this portfolio strategy, that you can have 29 complete losses as long as you have one investment that’s returning a 30 x or a larger return. And so the reason why the gut feel was so interesting and was such a factor for these investors was that when I looked at the overall decisions, when investors used their data, the financials, and so on and so forth, that on the aggregate their 30 might be a little bit on the plus side, but when their gut feel kicked in, that’s when they were able to identify that extraordinary unicorn, that one that was going to be a 300 x return, or identifying the one that was going to be the complete dog and a complete loss. So said another way, if you think about baseball averages, if you use your gut feel, you’re going to be hitting those home runs. You might not have the highest batting average, but you’re going to hit much more of those home runs. And that’s sort of what they were going for.

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m interested in the methodology because people’s accounts of what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished, sort of improve over time with the retelling. So if somebody makes what turned out to be the right decision, they may well say, “I had this gut feel,” even if they actually went through, I don’t know, a more conventional process. How do you factor that out, what people say versus maybe what actually happened?

LAURA HUANG: So if you’re going to study something like gut feel, if someone’s going to be studying gut feel and intuition, and trying to quantify what that is, the methodology is extremely important. So what I had to do was I had to really triangulate, I had to use a variety of different methods to really make sure that what I was studying was actually gut feel. So there was three big buckets that I would triangulate. The first was just interviews – thousands of interviews with individuals around what is their gut feel, what do they consider their gut feel, how do they make decisions, trying to take apart what that gut feel is Sometimes I didn’t even use the words gut feel, and I just asked them, “How did you make this decision,” trying to categorize and understand that. So then what I did was a content analysis of all of that. I would look at qualitatively, what kind of things are they saying, cluster analysis, all of that.

The second set of what I did was I did a bunch of field experiments where, for example, I would take business plans or pitches, and I would change a specific part of data. So I would say in one instance, “It’s the exact same company, but for one company it’s a $300 million market. For the other company, it’s a $3 million market.” I would experimentally test, give these investments to investors and say, “What are your opinions of this? Would you invest? How much would you invest,” and so on and so forth, so that I could compare different things. And so in one case, I would have an investor or an entrepreneur who elicited a very strong gut feel, and in one instance, someone who elicited a very weak gut feel. And I would take the same quotes that I used from the first set of studies and embed those there so I knew that they were, in fact gut feel.

And then the third set was just archival data where I collected pitches dating back to 2009. So everything from TechCrunch, Y Combinator, variety of different angel investment networks. And I’ve tested over, since 2009 to the present day, what were the gut feel that people had about them back when they were first starting? How strongly did they end up performing, which went bankrupt, which are now huge, massive IPO’d kind of startups, all of that kind of thing. So lots of things went into this.

ADI IGNATIUS: So some decisions are made truly by gut feel, some aren’t. What’s the value in breaking this all down?

LAURA HUANG: The first is that we misunderstand what gut feel actually is. So some of us tend to think that it’s like almost this mythical, mythical kind of superpower that we just tap into and that we just magically know. And other people are like, “Oh, no, no, it’s something that’s really biased. And you have to collect more data to understand.” So we all have a lay view of what gut feel actually is. And so the more that we can actually understand what gut feel actually is, the more we’re able to train it, and hone it, and harness it so that it’s something that becomes a tool. It’s something that becomes a compass for us to make our decisions and know that when we’re making those decisions that they’re going to be the accurate, trusted ones.

The question is often, what is gut feel? But it shouldn’t be what is gut feel? The question should be, who is gut feel? Because gut feel is you. And so when we understand that you could have a gut feel about something, and I could have a gut feel about the exact same decision, and they would be very, very different intuitions, and very, very different gut feels, but we would both be right because of who we are and how we’re bringing it forward. That starts to also muddle it a little bit. And so in my research career, I’ve constantly been trying to bring it back to the quantitative, bring it back to the science so that we can still have this very important concept that we understand both scientifically as well as personally.

ADI IGNATIUS: Does your research in some ways contrast with Daniel Kahneman’s ideas in Thinking, Fast and Slow? I mean, this is super simplified, but he have less confidence in our intuition and judgment than maybe you’re finding?

LAURA HUANG: Yeah. So that second category, what Danny Kahneman writes about is absolutely these shortcuts that our brains are taking, that we have these mental models that allow us to process information more quickly. And that’s absolutely part of what my research speaks to. But in this quantification process, what I find is that our gut feel is actually data plus experiences. So it’s this culminating factor. It takes into account all of our expertise, and our experiences, and our background, and our culture, even our trauma, all of our personal experiences added to the data that we’re being presented with, or that we see. And it’s this aggregate factor that allows us to make these decisions.

One of the reasons gut feel is so hard to define is because we’ve confused the different pieces of it, that there’s actually a process and an outcome. And the process is what I call the intuiting process. It’s this process that allows us to be integrating all of these different factors, this data, our personal experiences, and then at the end of the process there is an outcome, there is a gut feel outcome.

And sometimes we short circuit that process. And when we short circuit that process, we arrive at an answer that might not be reliable. But when we disentangle the fact that there is this intuiting process, which could be months, or years, or sometimes it could be seconds, the timing of that can be very fast or slow. And then there’s a gut feel outcome at the end. When we understand both those pieces and both those components, we can actually be tapping into it. We can be honing it, harnessing it, and training it to our benefit.

ADI IGNATIUS: And just to be clear, you’re saying that the gut feel based on, as you say, data on one’s experience that you’re honing along the way or throughout your career, that basically the gut feel is going to lead to a successful result, what more frequently than not? I mean, are you advocating for relying on your gut if you do it in the right way, because you will get better outcomes?

LAURA HUANG: When you use your gut feel for the right types of questions and the right types of problems, and you understand what is happening in this process, your gut feel will be correct 100% of the time, 100% of the time. So if you’re using it for things that are probabilistically deterministic, and you are jumping to some kind of conclusion, what I argue is that that’s not actually your gut feel. You think it is. It might be based on emotion, it might be based on something that you are sensing it might be based on, but it’s not actually that gut feel that we can trust and rely on, where your gut feel is not lying to you. Your gut feel doesn’t lie.

This is not something that’s linear. People can say, “How do I use my gut feel? What are the five steps that I need to take?” I can’t say to them, “Okay, step one, do this, step two, do this, step three, do this, step four, do this.” And that’s why it’s very difficult sometimes for us to understand scientifically, because we read things linearly, we try and understand things linearly. And yet the real power of gut feel is the fact that it’s not linear. It’s bringing together things that we might have remembered from when we are five years old, things that we learned when we were in our university days, and a piece of data that we encountered yesterday. We don’t process it linearly, even though there is a process and an outcome.

ADI IGNATIUS: Is the problem that you’re trying to address partly that people aren’t always comfortable with a decision that they know is their gut, right, is not pure data, let’s say, and that as a result, you’re getting policy paralysis, decision-making paralysis? Is that one of the key problems you’re trying to address here?

LAURA HUANG: Absolutely. The action piece of it, the not wanting to take action. I’ve seen decisions that have been made where we take the step, we do the thing, and then what do we all do? We post-hoc rationalize to find the data to support what it is we wanted to do anyways. And so what some of my research tries to aim to do is to illustrate that one of the things that your gut feel allows you to do is take action. You use your gut feel, you make the decision, and then you take all of the subsequent steps to make the decision you made the right one. And that’s part of the entire process. That’s where it’s not completely linear, it’s very circular.

So I would suspect that when we make a decision and everyone’s telling us, “Don’t do this,” but we do that, after we do that thing, we’re still supporting it. We’re still bringing in other things to make the right decision. Even when the investor makes the decision to invest in a certain startup, they’re still mentoring that entrepreneur, they’re still connecting that person, making introductions for them, providing them with other resources. You don’t just make that decision and say, “Okay, now let’s see if it turned out to be the right one or not.”

ADI IGNATIUS: So let me give you an example from my career and you can tell me if this is relevant or not. When I became editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review 16 years ago, one question was do we modernize the cover? So the cover used to be an old-fashioned, academic journal type cover with this the table of contents on the cover. And before I came to HBR, we had done, we’d brought in a consulting company, spent a lot of money in consulting, and they said, “Don’t touch the cover. The HBR cover with all everything listed is as iconic as Time Magazine’s red border, and, you know, touch that at your peril.”

Now, my gut feel, maybe it’s my intuition just said that that research didn’t make sense, particularly as we were moving into more of a digital age, for a variety of reasons that just didn’t make sense, particularly in the way we were trying to grow it. So we did change the cover, it worked out. Everything you could measure improved.

LAURA HUANG: Right.

ADI IGNATIUS: Now, maybe we just got lucky, or when you hear that story, how would you analyze that in terms of your research?

LAURA HUANG: Yeah, okay. So the first part, the maybe we just got lucky piece of it, that’s something that I hear a lot, because we don’t have the counterfactual. We don’t know what would’ve happened. We don’t have that A-B test. However, based on even just your description of it, there’s a number of components in my research that show that in fact, you did have a gut feel, you relied upon it, and it did not lead you astray. It led you to something that turned out to be very, very successful. So the first piece of it is that whenever, if you go back to even Bayesian statistics, you have priors and you have prompts. And your prompt was this individual telling you, “Don’t change the cover, it’s as timeless as the red border on Time Magazine.”

But that actually brought you to what I call this level of focused abstraction. You saw that there was a mismatch between what the data, these individuals were telling you and what all of your prior experiences – you knew things around customer preferences, you knew things about current trends, you knew things about the brand. All of that was aggregated into this feeling where you were like, “No, I have this gut feel that we should change the cover.”

What I talk about in this is that there are three manifestations of our gut feel. We will feel these categories differently. But generally, the first is called eureka, which is like we have these eureka moments like, “Ah. Aha. I’ve been trying to solve this problem, and finally I have the solution.” The second is what’s called a spidey sense, which is, “Ugh, something doesn’t feel right about what I’m hearing.” And then the third is what’s called the jolt, which is that you receive some sort of information or piece of information and it changes, it shifts the entire way that you see things. It shifts what your priors were. And when you’re making, and we all feel these differently, so your eureka moments, your spidey sense, there are ways in which we feel it emotionally. So your eureka moments might be like, “Ah,” you get a feeling of excitement, but somebody else might feel it as anxiety. We all feel it physically differently. It embodies us differently. You might feel it in your neck, somebody else might feel it in their shoulder, and so on and so forth. But when you’re telling me this story, I can pretty much almost surmise that you experienced something where you were combining your priors, this prompt, and there was something both in that personified, embodied, emotional, and cognitive combination that you recognized as being accurate and as your gut feel.

ADI IGNATIUS: For people who are trying to adopt this as a way to make better decisions, I mean, one could imagine a gut decision that’s just, “I sort of like this more than this. I like blue, I don’t like red.” Which seems random and maybe biased, versus the more considered, “Make sure your gut feel is informed by,” as you say, the data experience, your sense, even if you’re not thinking about it concretely, of the market of potential. So if somebody’s trying to learn how to do this right, how do they make sure these gut decisions that you say when they’re done right, it could be a hundred percent success rate, that it’s the real deal and not just a kind of random, you know…

LAURA HUANG: I mean, I think one of the things that you’re alluding to is this notion that sometimes people are like, “Well, how do I know that it’s my gut feel?” Because sometimes people are like, “Oh, but isn’t our gut feel just our emotions? If I’m feeling really excited about something or I’m feeling really anxious about something, how do I know that? How do I navigate that?” And one of the things that I think about sometimes is emotions are like children. Emotions are like children. You don’t want them driving your car because they’re going to crash it, but you don’t shove them in the trunk because they might die. So you want them in the backseat, where they can be seen, and they can be heard, and they can be attended to, but they’re not in control of anything. And I sort of love this metaphor because it gets at something, it gets at this question that you’re asking. When we’re trying to recognize our gut feel, we’re not supposed to suppress it. We’re not suppressing our emotions, we’re not shoving them in the trunk.

We also don’t want them driving the car. But we’re supposed to give them the right seat. Emotions are part of the process. And this is where people often get mixed up. Gut feel is much more layered, it’s much more nuanced. It’s our lived experiences, it’s our subconscious pattern recognition, it’s our memory, and yes, it’s also our emotions all rolled into this internal executive summary. And gut feel doesn’t shout, it whispers. So I talk about in my work, like, “We need to get better at listening to what whispers and not what screams.” There’s so much out there that’s screaming at us, not just literally screaming at us, literally loud like ambulances, and dishwashers, and vacuum machines, but there are things that are loud, like algorithms, getting suggested the next YouTube video to watch, social media, social pressure, all these things. And so we want to make sure that we’re listening to what whispers and what’s not shouting.

So how do we do this? Okay. We want to make sure that we let our emotions ride along but not run the show. So one of the things that I tell people to do is like, “When you’re uncertain, just ask yourself, like, ‘Am I acting from clarity, from a place of clarity, or am I acting from something that I haven’t named yet? So if I were completely calm, would I still make the same decision?’ And if the answer is yes, it’s probably your gut feel, but if the answer is no, it might be your emotion trying to take that front seat.”

Something else you can do is give it a little bit of time, give it like 24 hours. If you feel something, a sense of urgency pushing you towards a decision, give it 24 hours. If it’s truly your gut, that clarity will remain. But if it was just emotion, that urgency will fade and you’ll know that it was something else. And so your decision around the cover, I would guess that if somebody had asked you and said, “Are you acting from a place of clarity? Are you acting from sort of pressure to change the cover?” I think if you were completely calm, you would probably have made the same decision.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so let me give you another example. So I interviewed Barry Diller recently on this podcast, and very successful entertainment internet entrepreneur. He’s all about intuition and gut. I mean, he’s almost the opposite of, I don’t know, what they teach in business school. So he says that he makes decisions in a very intuitive way. He will spur debate, he will encourage a cacophony in the discussion, and he says he listens for what he calls the truth of things, right? That things will ring true, and you can act on that. So he gave an example, that he spent a billion dollars to buy Expedia right around 9/11. You know, they had a chance to cancel the deal after 9/11 when Expedia literally had zero business. And someone around the table said, “If there’s life, there’s travel.” And he’s like, “Okay, that rings true. We got to do this.”

LAURA HUANG: Yeah.

ADI IGNATIUS: Is that an example of everything you’re talking about?

LAURA HUANG: That, “If there’s life, there’s travel,” that is that focused abstraction. That’s like getting to that level. What you’re describing is listening for that moment of truth. And that moment of truth you can either force it, and try and look out for it, or it’s something that comes to you. And so that’s where it’s sometimes tricky. That’s why sometimes people struggle with gut feel, but that focused abstraction, that point at which you get there, that’s that sort of catalyst and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m having that eureka moment,” or, “Ah, this is what my spidey sense was telling me,” or, “Oh, I’m just having this jolt.”

Mickey Drexler, who, the former CEO of Old Navy, Gap, J.Crew, also, when I speak with him, he’s like, “If you know, you know.” He gets to that point where he just knows. He can see something, he can know that back in the day it was the white t-shirts and the blue jeans that were going to create this huge revolution for Gap. That’s that focused abstraction, that point that you get to.

ADI IGNATIUS: Some of the most interesting strategy case studies to me at least, are of companies that took the plunge and completely remade their business model. You know? They did one thing for decades and then just thought, “This is not sustainable,” and just did something else. And it’s about bravery and maybe seeing around corners, but it’s a bet on an unknown future. And I think particularly with AI sort of hovering around us, a lot of companies are thinking, “Do I need to make a big, bold bet like that?” And I guess my question to you is what’s your advice? Because the data will not be there, right?

The data will help. Data always helps, but in seeing around corners, you have to rely on something, some sense of weak signals, some sense of intuition, some sense of gut. What’s your advice for the many, many, many companies that are struggling with exactly that right now?

LAURA HUANG: Yeah, you have to understand your variables. If you look at any equation that’s out there and you change one variable, the entire thing has to be rebalanced. The entire equation is now different. Let me give you an example that illustrates this a little bit. So when you speak of some of these strategy case studies, these decisions that people made, one of the case studies that I used to teach, one of the case studies that I loved was about a man named Ron Johnson. Maybe you’re familiar with Ron Johnson, who was formerly the head of formerly the CEO of JCPenney.

So Ron Johnson is someone who was dubbed the biggest business failure of the 21st century. Less than 18 months after he was named CEO of JCPenney, who was unceremoniously fired. But the thing about Ron Johnson is that he was extremely successful before he came to JCPenney. He started his career. So he had worked at Target, and he had done all sorts of brilliant things at Target. He’s the person who literally turned target into Tarzhay.

He also then went to work for Apple, and turned Apple into a tremendous … I mean, he was responsible for the layout of the Apple Stores, just like he was responsible for the layout of Target stores. At Apple, he turned it into this sort of beautiful minimalist, this white and the glass. He was the one who created the Genius Bar. Extremely successful in both of those situations.

Then he goes to JCPenney, and he again sort of uses his gut feel to make these strategic decisions, but falls flat on his face. And so the question is why? How did that happen? And this is where that variable comes into play. We need to be able to look around corners, because we don’t have all of the data. We will never have more than, at best, we can assume that we would have 80% of the data that we need to use, we need to make our decision. And so what Ron Johnson was missing was this key variable that had shifted, that at Target, there was this opportunity that he had. There was this opportunity to take it from what it was to where it could be. Same thing at Apple.

But at JCPenney, what was happening was that they were bleeding cash, and what he needed to do was stop the bleeding. So instead of taking, using the same mental models, and priors, and prototypes, and things that he had done at his prior companies, he fell prey to situational arrogance. He used the same variables that he had had from before. And so part of understanding our gut feel is being able to know ourselves, and know our priors, know this prompt, being able to match the two together. And I talk a lot in my book and in my research about how exactly can we do that? How can we start to recognize these variables that may be presenting themselves to us that we don’t necessarily notice?

ADI IGNATIUS:  You talked about how two people, you and I might have different gut responses to a situation, and they might both be authentic. What if I’m the CEO and you’re the board chair, and our gut sense, I say X, and you say the opposite of X. What do you do with a contradiction like that?

LAURA HUANG: Yeah. When we think of things like that, we’re understanding that there are different types of problems, or maybe we’re not understanding that there are different types of problems. So there are simple problems, there are complicated problems, there are complex problems, and there are chaotic problems. And when we start to say something like, “Well, I think X and you think Y.” It’s almost like we’re implicitly saying, “This is a simple problem where we’re only going to do X or we’re only going to do Y.” For simple problems, problems where there is a deterministic, probabilistic solution, we should not be using our gut feel. If we’re flipping a coin and we say, “Is it going to be heads or is it going to be tails? Oh, I’ve just got this gut feel, it’s going to be tails.” We shouldn’t be using our gut feel for that. Okay.

We also tend to use our gut feel for complicated problems, and we shouldn’t be using our gut feel for complicated problems, because complicated problems are just a series of simple problems. And because of time, or because of resources, or because of whatever, we sometimes just don’t take the steps we need, and we just rely on what we call our gut feel to solve those complicated problems because we don’t then invest in the training, or the right resources, or the people, or the expertise that we need to actually get there.

But for complex and chaotic problems, those problems where we truly don’t have a way of piecing it out, because we will never get more than 80% of the data, because the answer is never going to be a simple XY, that’s when we need to use our gut feel. So going back to the CEO thinks X and the board member thinks Y, that’s almost like we’re implicitly saying, “It’s a simple problem. Why are we not? How can we be disagreeing,” instead of acknowledging that it’s probably a chaotic problem, where there are some variables that are much more in line with what the CEO is thinking, maybe around the product, maybe around the marketing, maybe there are other variables that are much more in line with what the board member is saying, and we need to understand the entirety of what that problem looks like.

ADI IGNATIUS: There’s a great quote in your book. You say, “Intuition is like love, or cooking, or chess, or music. You can understand it and enjoy it at any level, but to truly master it is transcendent.” I love everything you’re saying but we’re practical on this show so how do we start to really master this intuition, that I agree with you is going to be even more important in the future?

LAURA HUANG: So the only way we can master it, it’s like thinking about you taste something, imagine you’re a chef or you’re someone who’s tasting something, and you’re like, “This is just the perfect bite that I took.” You’re never going to really understand that unless you understand, “Okay, the different taste, there’s salt, there’s sweet, there’s salty, there’s umami, there’s different taste profiles.” And so that’s that science behind it, being able to train ourselves on, “Okay, this is what salty is, this is what sweet is, this is what sour is, this is what umami is.” And then you start to combine it.

The first is learn the rules of the game. That’s the science. What is gut feel? So that’s understanding all of the pieces of this, that intuition is a process, gut feel is an outcome, that gut feel is quiet, that gut feel is sensed in three different ways, that it compels action, all of those things. So learning the rules. And then the second half of it is how do we actually engage that? How do we play it? How do we start playing the game now that we know it? How do we start to understand what rules can be broken, what rules should be followed, which ones we should be careful of? And that’s doing the introspection, the interactions, the iterations behind all of what we learned in terms of the rules.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, Laura, this is really interesting. Thank you very much for being on IdeaCast.

LAURA HUANG: My pleasure. Thank you so much.

ADI IGNATIUS: That was Laura Huang, professor and associate dean at Northeastern University. She’s also the author of the book, You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition.

Next week, Alison will speak to Andrew Brodsky about consciously building a remote communication culture.

If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive Insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe. And thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager, Ian Fox and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We will be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Adi Ignatius.

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