As researchers, we are trained to demand evidence before believing something. We pride ourselves on the phrase, “Show me the data.” And yet, I’m struck by how quickly we discount the human side of knowing—the intuition, tacit knowledge, and “spidey sense” that quietly guides so many of our decisions. In my own life, I’ve learned that those gut feelings often point to something real. You try something, and it just works. You see a pattern and instinctively know what to do next. But too often, those moments get dismissed as “just anecdotal” or “just the placebo effect.” The irony is that this dismissal can blind us to real phenomena worth understanding. Why does this matter? Because intuition isn’t magic—it’s experience speaking. Expertise is defined as the ability to recognize patterns from having done something thousands of times, even if you can’t fully explain how you know what you know. In those cases, demanding formal evidence before trusting someone’s judgment can actually make us ignore valuable knowledge. Of course, there’s a danger here. Everyone likes to believe they’re an expert. That’s why separating genuine expertise from overconfidence is hard. Still, when someone with deep experience says, “This works,” we should pay attention—especially if the claim has persisted across contexts. Another reason we discount intuition is that effects vary. In research, these differences are called moderators—factors that change the size or even the direction of an effect. Something might work brilliantly for one person but barely move the needle for another. Think about marijuana: for some, it’s a knockout; for others, it does nothing. Medicine often ignores these nuances, chasing an “average effect” instead of exploring why outcomes differ. This is changing with personalized medicine, which recognizes that context, genetics, and environment shape results. The same principle applies in management and innovation. An approach that’s a breakthrough in one setting may flop in another. The fact that it doesn’t work everywhere doesn’t mean it’s useless—it means it’s context-dependent. But when we only look for universal effects, we overlook valuable local knowledge. So how do you tell if a feeling is worth trusting? I think it comes down to two things: 1. Depth of experience – Repeated exposure to a problem builds pattern recognition that can’t be faked. 2. Deliberate reflection – Paying close attention, experimenting, and adjusting until you see what really matters. Neither guarantees truth, but both increase the odds that your intuition is pointing to something real. The challenge, especially in research, is to notice these patterns before they disappear under layers of skepticism. And yes, we need to weed out the “woo” from reality. There’s a lot of junk science and wishful thinking out there. But history is full of ideas that were once dismissed as nonsense—handwashing, for example—that turned out to be correct. Often, the people raising them couldn’t prove their case at first. That doesn’t mean they were wrong; it means they were ahead of the evidence. So, maybe the next time someone says, “I know it works—I’ve seen it a hundred times,” we pause before dismissing them. We ask: • How much experience do they have? • Have they paid attention to patterns? • Could the effect be real for some people, even if not for all? Because if we’re honest, a lot of what moves the world forward starts with a hunch that doesn’t yet have a p-value attached to it.
