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Alan writes in part:

"I am writing a dissertation at Columbia on the topic How do Suburban High
School Principals Use Intuition in Making Human Resource Decisions? A
Critical Incident Perspective. Does anyone have any opinion or research
recommendations on using intuition in decision-making?"

You might want to check the work of Gary Klein in his book Sources of
Power. A book recommended by Chet Richards, following the John Boyd path
of reducing the decision-making cycle to improve performance. (Boyd
essentially wrote the book on jet fighter pilot tactics -- a life-and-death
performance improvement situation!) Klein's focus is on sources of power -
powers of intuition and mental simulation - as relatively poorly-understood
sources of decision-making power, especially in 'natural' situations. He
contrasts this with formal, rational, step-wise decision-making in
artificial situations where the problems is quite well-formed. The book is
based on lots of research in a variety of settings, with stories
interspersed throughout - perhaps 10% of the 295 pages. As I got farther
into this book, I was surprised to find out how many things it pulled
together from my last couple decades of reading: systems thinking,
scenario planning, artificial intelligence, systems analysis and design,
testing procedures, project planning, knowledge engineering, learning
theory, information theory, story-telling and metaphors, communities of
practice ???

Michael A

Michael Ayers
mbayers@earthlink.net <=> www.TheCommonwealthPractice.com
-> Who are you gonna be while you're doing what you do? <-
612.308.0501 (mobile)

Alan,

You may wish first to unpack what you mean by intuition.

One approach is consider the literature on tacit knowledge.

Another is to consider work on how people use heuristics. Some authors
consider heuristic reasoning as a sub-optimal approach to
decision-making which is contrasted with a normatively rational formal
approach. However, Gigerenzer has done some excellent work on the
different forms of rationality that lie behind some of our heuristics. I
would recommend his (200) book "Adaptive Thinking".

Another approach is to consider intuition as the (experience based)
ability to engage in effective situational discriminations. You may find
the Dreyfus and Dreyfus(2005) article in Organisation Studies useful
here.

Best regards

Mark Fenton-O'Creevy