To take one example, when your inbox brims with new emails at the start of a new day, there is absolutely no way to read them all carefully.Intuition is what helps you decide which ones to answer and which to delete or leave unopened.Emails that are part of existing threads: open.Messages from people directly above and below you: open.Reminders from the chief information officer that cyber-security really, really matters: delete.Instinct is also at work on those occasions when people have completely zoned out.They might be working on something else during a Zoom call, or playing chess on their phones, or simply admiring the ceiling pattern.Suddenly they are aware of a silence, and realise that they have been asked something or are expected to make a contribution.This is the office equivalent of coming face to face with a lion.Those who are fit to survive will say something plausible like “I’d like to understand how we are measuring success,” prompting murmurs of agreement from everyone else who hasn’t been paying attention but senses this might be a good answer.Fast thinking is not just about self-preservation.It can help the entire organisation.The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all.Yet as data gushes from every pore of the modern organisation, the temptation to ask for one more bit of analysis has become much harder to resist.A well-established psychological phenomenon known as “verbal overshadowing” captures the danger of overthinking things: people are more likely to misidentify someone in a line-up if they have spent time writing a description of their faces.Managers often suffer from analytical overshadowing, mulling a simple problem until it turns into a complex one.
