Managerial intuition and the development of executive support systems

Managerial intuition is a well-recognized cognitive ability but still poorly understood for the purpose of developing effective Executive Support Systems (ESS). This paper reviews research on cognition involved in intuition. The review shows that, in everyday decision making, executives are not passive choice makers but are active sensemakers who rely on perception, action, and imaginistic reasoning to arrive at solutions to problems. The combination of these cognitive resources appears to be seamless. Furthermore, the knowledge needed for problem solving is distributed between the manager's mind and the surrounding world. As a result, managers' intuition can be effective in handling dynamic, ill-structured problem situations. To develop an ESS that fits this perception-action ecology of the manager's life in a hectic world, we must go beyond the emphasis of the tasks' functionalities. The author proposes an ecological model of managerial intuition and recommends methodologies that focus the analysis on the interplay between the manager and their environment. He also suggests guidelines to improve the ESS development such that the powerful intuition of managers and the analytic capability of the computer may be combined. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.