"General propositions do not decide concrete cases. The decision will depend on a judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise." (Oliver W Holmes, [Lochner v. New York, 198 US 76] 1905)
"Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; [...]" (Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World", 1914)
"In most management problems there are too many possibilities to expect experience, judgement, or intuition to provide good guesses, even with perfect information." (Russell L Ackoff, "Management Science", 1967)
"Analysis is not a scientific procedure for reaching decisions which avoid intuitive elements, but rather a mechanism for sharpening the intuition of the decision maker." (James R Schlesinger, "Memorandum to Senate Committee on Government Operations", 1968)
"In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis." (Kenichi Ohmae, "The Mind Of The Strategist", 1982)
"[Management science techniques] have had little impact on areas of decision-making where the management problems do not lend themselves to explicit formulation, where there are ambiguous or overlapping criteria for action, and where the manager operates through intuition. (James L McKenney & Peter G W Keen, Harvard Business Review on Human Relations, 1986)
"You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use." (Geoffrey Moore, "Crossing the Chasm", 1991)
"Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations. […] Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving." (Henry Mintzberg, 1994)
"Acquired patterns and the logic to employ them combine with our inherent qualities to create a unique decision-maker. As time goes by, experience and knowledge are focused through the prism of talent, which can itself be sharpened, focused, and polished. This mix is the source of intuition, an absolutely unique tool that each of us possesses and that we can continuously hone into an ever-finer instrument." (Garry Kasparov, "How Life Imitates Chess", 2007)
"Our minds, especially our intuitions, are not equipped to deal with a probabilistic world. Risk and prediction are widely misunderstood, […] All decision making in a probabilistic world involves estimating the likelihood of an event and how much we will value it (affective forecasting). Humans are bad at both - particularly at the former. […] In business, understanding the psychology of risk is more important than understanding the mathematics of risk." (Paul Gibbons, "The Science of Successful Organizational Change", 2015)
"To make the best decisions in business and in life, we need to be adept at many different forms of thinking, including intuition, and we need to know how to incorporate many different types of inputs, including numerical data and statistics (analytics). Intuition and analytics don't have to be seen as mutually exclusive at all. In fact, they can be viewed as complementary." (Ben Jones, "Avoiding Data Pitfalls: How to Steer Clear of Common Blunders When Working with Data and Presenting Analysis and Visualizations", 2020)
