CHAPTER 17: Intuitive Decision Making: The Wisdom of Tacit Knowing-in-Action

Adult learners confront daily environments of complex and dynamic challenges and diverse opportunities of self-efficacy that often require immediate decisions. Suppose the adult learner could be as effective in using the wisdom of personal intuition to make decisions as in applying an analytic decision making process.

The problem of this qualitative research was how to perceive or understand the phenomenon of intuitive decision making. By common description, the concept of intuition is an enigma of direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought. Goldberg (2005) stated that “intuition is the condensation of vast prior analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized. In effect, then, intuitive decision making is post-analytic, rather than pre-analytic or non-analytic” (p.150). Myers (2002) posed that “if intuition is immediate knowing, without reasoned analysis, then perceiving is intuition par excellence” (p. 5).