A Fingertip Feel

Something we’ve been thinking about

In Sources of Power, the psychologist Gary Klein tells a story Daniel Kahneman later retold in Thinking, Fast and Slow: a fire lieutenant’s crew was hosing down what looked like a routine kitchen fire, though the fire was quieter than it should have been and the living room far hotter than a kitchen fire could explain. Something felt wrong to him, and he ordered his crew out; moments later the floor where they had been standing collapsed into a burning basement no one knew was there. For years he said the decision came from ESP. When Klein walked him back through the call, it became clear that the lieutenant was picking up on a wider variety of information than he was consciously aware of in the moment. These clues gave him that undefined sense that they needed to leave.

How we see it through leadership economics

A burning house, like most situations leaders face, has more dimensions than anyone can consciously track at once, and deliberately weighing more of them often makes decisions worse, because each added consideration brings its own uncertainty about how much it matters. But conscious attention is not the whole of perception. Our eyes see sharply only a small patch at a time, yet we take in the whole room, and it is the wide, unfocused remainder that tells us where to look next. Experience seems to build the same wide field for judgment. Years of fires had taught the lieutenant’s perception what a kitchen fire should feel like, and when this one did not match, the mismatch reached him as a feeling rather than as a list of reasons; he said ESP because the feeling came with no explanation. This is much of what we mean by Execution: in the moment there is often no time to gather more information, so acting well depends on what perception has already taken in, and a trained intuition is one of the ways it gets through. It works the same way with people: you can tell a friend is not okay before they have said anything, though you could not list what told you. The Germans have a word for this, Fingerspitzengefühl, a fingertip feel for the situation, and the fire lieutenant’s came from years of fires (and probably not ESP). That is the encouraging part: a feel for situations can be trained, and much of leadership is exactly that work, giving a team enough repetitions with honest feedback that their perception begins to take in more than they can say.

A line we’re sitting with

I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.

Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”