Stop Blocking your Team's Intuition
Where does confidence originate?
I’m a recovering left-brainer. Early in my career I thought confidence was fueled by understanding. Understanding topics. Frameworks. Languages. People. That seemed all fine and well in my head.
But it didn’t bode well in the real world. I understood— but wasn’t confident in my understaning.
I took a hiatus to travel and develop myself personally, outside of my tech career. Yoga, health, ayahuasca, personal development, life coaching, communication training, dating, business training, entrepreneurship, psychology, relationships…
It’s a long list.
It was the lesson I needed.
Confidence does not emerge from understanding—
Confidence emerges from knowing.
Understanding vs. Knowing
We like to think we are our brain. The brain is just an organ that we use to generate thought. Even those thoughts are not our known. Merely projections of all the accumulated noise we ingest. Here’s a picture of an elephant. Ignore it. Tell your brain to ignore it.
Your brain is a part of your body, nothing more. Did you know it isn’t the only dense nerve bundle in your body?
You also have a densely packed cluster around your heart—that’s why it is capable of beating on its own— and it even projects its own electro-magnetic field that you can detect outside of your body. How cool is that!
And then there’s the vagus nerve. The event bus that manages all of your intuition and “out there” shower thoughts. That is where the feeling of knowing originates.
I am referring to a kind of deep knowing. The kind of knowing you felt when you decided to choose your career. The knowing you felt when you met your partner.
You didn’t feel it in your brain. You felt it in your gut. Your chest. Your spleen. An itch down the right side of your back.
How to tap into it
This intuitive knowing is often drowned by the noise and chatter produced by your brain’s thoughts. Especially the negative ones! It follows obviously that the best way to tap into it is with activities that calm or distract the mind:
When you feel your body
When you are relaxed
When you are moving
This makes showers the primary accelerator for all your useful ideas in life.
Now— I’m not saying your dev team needs a designated shower next to every desk. Though if you have a shower in the office, hats off to you!
But there is a reason why when your team is stuck on a problem they like to sit down for a meeting or walk to lunch. It’s not the meeting or food that unblocks them. It’s their intuition.
Design is Intuitive — Stop blocking your team’s intuition
Most developers who write very good code have an extraordinary connection to their sense of intuition. Have you heard the phrase “this doesn’t feel right?” when describing a piece of architecture or code?
The purpose of this issue isn’t to teach you how to tap into Jesus. Instead, I want to highlight what negative habits block your team’s intuition:
Being blamed individually for technical, feature, project or product failures— triggers negative chatter in their brain— it’s a team, let the team take responsibility without pointing fingers
Pressure without rest— stretches of high-performance, high-stress work require cooldown periods and rest (by the way, that’s the best time to write documentation!)
Shutting down conversations and answers that are intuitive (knowing) but lack context (understanding)— encourage new views. Measure.
They resist. They are defensive. This is natural. Don’t steamroll or mandate. Explore objections. Hear them out. Help them feel heard.
Stop conflating estimates with forecasts. Stop conflating plans and specs with certain outcomes. Encourage the assumption that all plans are inaccurate and wildly unreasonable.
Remember: Confidence is built like a muscle. Confidence emerges from knowing. Knowing is reinforced when you allow your team to explore their intuition. Exploration and discovery that turns into data. Data that accelerates your decision making process.
A good, improving decision making process is what crafts a high performing team.
Really enjoyed this post. Would love to hear more about how to get individuals to start listening more to their instinct. I know many orgs militate against it in the way they structure their teams and processes. But any guidance for people who want to tap into their tech intuition without having to take ayahuasca?