Gut Feeling: Nouse, Acumen or Just Plain Common Sense?
Lindsay R. Dodd
02 Jul, 2025
“I don’t know why—I just know.”
You’ve heard it in the boardroom. You’ve said it yourself.
Gut feeling. Instinct. Intuition.
Or, if you’re Australian or British and over 50, you might call it nouse.
If you're a management consultant, you'll probably prefer acumen.
And if you're a practical farmer from western NSW? Just good old common sense.
But whatever the packaging, gut feeling is that peculiar, often wordless knowing that lives outside spreadsheets, flowcharts, or five-year plans. It’s what makes a leader pause and not sign the deal everyone else is raving about—or greenlight a renegade idea when the models say “don’t.”
And it’s not magic.
It’s intelligence, just a different sort.
The Myth of Rational Supremacy
In the C-Suite, we worship at the altar of data. We sprinkle dashboards over our presentations like parmesan on pasta, and expect every decision to be "evidence-based," “data-informed,” or “algorithmically sound.”
And yet…
Many of the world’s most consequential business decisions weren’t made from data alone. Steve Jobs didn’t read a customer survey before removing the keyboard from the phone. Warren Buffett often describes his choices as “feeling right.” Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, spoke frequently about relying on her instincts, especially when stepping into uncharted waters.
Behind the scenes, these titans of industry often talk less about numbers and more about a feeling in the bones—a quiet sense that something is either deeply wrong or exactly right.
So why do we pretend otherwise?
Because gut feeling makes people nervous.
Especially the kind of people who like pie charts and quarterly earnings calls. It feels unscientific, unquantifiable, even irresponsible. But here’s the thing:
Gut feeling is not the absence of thinking. It is the integration of experience.
What Is Gut Feeling, Really?
Let’s get something straight.
A true gut feeling—an intuitive sense honed over years of experience—is not the same as a whim, a prejudice, or a knee-jerk reaction. It’s not:
“I just don’t like her.”
“We’ve never done it that way.”
“It’s not what the others are doing.”
Those are biases dressed in intuition’s clothes.
A real gut feeling—let’s call it executive intuition—is:
Fast, but not frantic
Subtle, but persistent
Informed, though not always conscious
In essence, it’s your brain drawing on decades of learned experience, pattern recognition, and tacit knowledge—so rapidly that the process doesn’t rise to the level of language. It just shows up as a feeling.
Some call this heuristic judgment. Others call it executive instinct. But whatever the name, its credibility lies not in how it feels—but in who is feeling it.
Experience Makes the Gut Smarter
Let’s face it: not all guts are created equal.
If you’re 32 and in your second job, your "instinct" may actually be untested bias. If you’re 62, with thirty years of hard-won scars across multiple industries, your gut has a database—one that machine learning would envy.
Experience matters. But so does reflection on that experience.
Cognitive scientists suggest that intuition improves when:
The domain is predictable (like chess or surgery), and
You get regular feedback (so you learn from your choices).
Leadership, unfortunately, doesn’t always offer that luxury. Decisions often play out over years. Results can be muddied by external factors. And feedback? Often filtered through egos, org charts, and time.
That’s why the best leaders cultivate not just experience, but meaningful reflection. They digest their mistakes. They sift their successes. They don’t just live through decades—they mine them for gold.
That’s how you build what I call an educated gut.
Gut vs. Data: A False Dichotomy
Here’s the mistake too many executives make: they pit gut feeling against data, as if they must choose one or the other.
False.
The best leaders do not ignore data. They swim in it. But they also interpret it through experience, emotion, and instinct.
Gut feeling is not an alternative to analysis. It’s a complement.
Think of it this way:
Data can tell you what is happening. Gut feeling tells you what matters.
You might know the customer churn rate is up 3.2%. But your instinct tells you why.
You see two candidates with identical résumés. But one gives you a quiet sense of volatility.
You hear that the merger terms are “excellent.” But something in your core says: this will destroy our culture.
These aren’t hallucinations. They’re signals from the most complex instrument you own: your integrated human mind.
When Gut Feeling Goes Wrong
Of course, gut feeling can mislead. Especially when it’s actually:
Ego
Fear
Comfort-seeking
Confirmation bias
Nostalgia
Sometimes, what we call intuition is actually just the subconscious seeking to reinforce old assumptions. That’s dangerous.
That’s why the smartest leaders don’t blindly trust their gut. They:
Examine it
Articulate it
Stress-test it with trusted peers
Compare it to the data
Ask themselves: is this insight or instinct?
Used wisely, gut feeling is not a dictator. It’s a red flag, or a green light. It says: “Pay attention. Something’s here.”
It’s the start of inquiry—not the end of it.
Boards: Where Gut Feeling is Both Crucial and Contested
In boardrooms, gut feeling gets complicated.
On the one hand, board directors are chosen for their experience—for their ability to see what others might miss, and to steer decisions based on insight, not just information.
On the other hand, boards are composed of multiple people with different instincts. So what happens when one director's gut says “yes” and another’s says “hell no”?
That’s where conversation becomes crucial. Because gut feelings are contagious—but they’re also improvable. When one seasoned director expresses a visceral reaction, a good Chair doesn’t dismiss it. He or she invites it in:
“Tell us what you’re sensing.”
“What does this remind you of?”
“What’s your concern beneath the concern?”
Boards that listen to each other’s instincts—and interrogate them respectfully—are boards that make wise decisions. Boards that ignore them risk flying blind.
Nouse: The Australian / British Cousin of Acumen
Let’s pause for a moment on that wonderfully British word: nouse.
If you’ve never come across it, nouse (rhymes with “mouse”) refers to street smarts, practical intelligence, and savvy beyond theory. It’s not academic. It’s earned.
Nouse is the warehouse manager who can smell when the supply chain is about to collapse. The CFO who spots the creative accounting no one else noticed. The Chairman who hears a pitch and says, “They’re over-leveraged and under-prepared.”
This, I argue, is gut feeling plus grit.
And it’s woefully underappreciated in a world obsessed with digital dashboards.
Nouse cannot be taught in a semester. But it can be developed in an executive team or a boardroom—by creating space for lived experience to speak up, even when it doesn’t come with a bar graph.
The Danger of Over-Reliance
Let’s be honest: some executives overplay their gut.
They pride themselves on being “mavericks” or “contrarians.” They wear their instincts like a badge. And sometimes, they win.
But often, they create blind spots, ignore contrary evidence, and make bad calls that feel brave but are, in fact, reckless.
Intuition is powerful. But so is the confirmation bias that can come with success.
Just because your gut got it right before doesn’t mean it will again. Just because you feel sure doesn’t mean you are.
Wisdom is knowing when to interrogate your instinct—and when to trust it without a spreadsheet in sight.
How to Hone Your Gut: A Short Playbook for Leaders
If you want to become more intuitive without becoming impulsive, here’s how:
Reflect on Past Decisions
Ask: When have I trusted my gut—and been right? When was I wrong? Why?Stay Close to the Front Lines
Don’t rely only on filtered reports. Speak to customers. Visit warehouses. Read the raw data.Build a Council of Sceptics
Surround yourself with people who challenge your instincts—not to weaken them, but to refine them.Pay Attention to Your Body
Sometimes the gut speaks physically: a tension in the shoulders, a twist in the stomach, a tightness in the jaw. Learn your own signals.Journal Your Instincts
Before making a decision, write down your initial instinct—before the analysis. Then, later, compare it to what happened.Differentiate Emotion from Intuition
Fear, anger, hope, excitement—they’re all noisy. Learn to separate the signal from the emotional static.
Courage: The Quiet Partner of Instinct
At the highest levels of leadership, gut feelings often point to risky moves.
Walking away from a lucrative offer
Restructuring before the market demands it
Investing in something that makes no financial sense yet
Saying no when everyone says yes
These moments require courage. Because following your gut doesn’t just mean trusting your instincts—it means being willing to be wrong in public.
That’s why so many leaders ignore their intuition. It’s not that they don’t have a gut feeling. It’s that they don’t want to risk it.
But real leadership?
It means listening to that quiet voice inside—even when the room is loud with certainty.
Final Thoughts: The Gut Is Not a Myth. It’s a Muscle.
So let’s stop pretending that gut feeling is a last resort, or a reckless override of “proper” process.
Let’s treat it as what it is:
A valuable, trainable, experience-rich decision tool—especially at the top.
Let’s teach leaders to differentiate between instinct and impulse. Let’s create cultures where nouse is respected as much as metrics. And let’s remind ourselves that while AI can crunch numbers in milliseconds, only humans can draw on decades of messy, textured, emotional, complex experience—and feel the future.
In an age obsessed with artificial intelligence, don’t forget to trust your real intelligence.
The one in your gut.
Postscript for the Boardroom:
If you’re sitting on a board and haven’t had a “gut moment” in the last quarter, ask yourself: are we listening? Are we inviting? Are we brave enough to say “this doesn’t feel right”—even when the slides say it’s fine?
And if you’re a Chair, do more than ask for data. Ask for discernment.
Because, in the end, what separates the great leaders from the good isn’t just what they know—it’s what they sense.
That’s not mysticism. That’s leadership.
Dr Lindsay R. Dodd is a boardroom strategist, legal academic, and pragmatic advisor with a fondness for straight talk, self-awareness, and calling things what they are. He specializes in cutting through governance theatre to get to the heart of what drives real organizational impact.