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每次考完试前，总有人会告诉你：要相信你的第一感觉，拿不准的时候，不要改答案！ 往往有时候，当你改了答案，结果就错了。 所以，直觉很重要。 那么，在职场中，你要怎么利用自己的直觉呢？ 今天我们来读一读《经济学人》Bartleby专栏的文章—
When to trust your gut-什么时候相信自己的直觉 Deliberation is not always the best option 深思熟虑并非好事
Humans have been honed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certain situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors spotted movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and grunt questions later. At the same time, the capacity to analyse and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals. The question of when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—matters in the office as much as in the savannah. 几百万年的进化史，已经让人磨练出一种能力——不用三思而后行就能做出反映。如果你的祖先发现树丛下有东西在动，他们就先逃然后再讨论动的东西是啥。 与此同时，分析和计划的能力是人区别于动物的一个特点。问题是何时相信你的直觉，何时验证你的假想正确与否。用心理学家Daniel Kahneman 的话来说思考快与慢无论在人类社会还是动物世界都很重要。 这段中，作者用了一个比喻in the office as much as in the savannah直译是在办公室里和在热带草原中。 你要知道的是，作者并不是真的指这两个地方，而是用以代替两个社会：人类社会和动物社会。所以翻译的时候，我们也可以将其意译成：人类社会和动物世界。 Deliberative thinking is the hallmark of a wellmanaged workplace. Strategic overhauls and budget discussions are built on rounds of meetings, memos, formulas and presentations. Processes are increasingly designed to stamp out instinctive responses. From blind screening of job applicants to using “redteaming” techniques to pick apart a firm’s plans, rigour trumps reflex. 深思熟虑是管理良好的标志。战略修整和预算讨论要经过几轮的会议，备忘，规则和演示达成的。这些过程的出现让本能反映越来越无法立足。 从招聘盲筛到利用“红队研判”技巧选出公司计划的演变告诉你谨慎胜过直觉。 Red Teaming is the process of using Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) to emulate a real-world threat with the goals of training and measuring the effectiveness of the people, processes, and technology used to defend an environment. Yet instinct also has its place. Some decisions are more connected to emotional responses and inherently less tractable to analysis. Does a marketing campaign capture the essence of your company, say, or would this person work well with other people in a team? In sticky customerservice situations, intuition is often a better guide to how to behave than a script. 不过，直觉也有一席之地。比起理性分析，有些决定与情感反映的关系更密切。比如，营销活动是否抓住了公司的本质特征，或者某个人是否能与团队的其他人合作顺畅？ 在遇到难以应对的顾客时，依靠直觉反应通常是更好的策略，因为它不会想提前准备好的剧本那么生硬。 Sticky customer-service situations 其实指的是遇到难缠的顾客或者服务被投诉等情况。 Gut instincts can also be improved (call it “probiotic management”). Plenty of research has shown that intuition becomes more unerring with experience. In one wellknown experiment, conducted in 2012, volunteers were asked to assess whether a selection of designer handbags were counterfeit or real. Some were instructed to operate on instinct and others to deliberate over their decision. Intuition worked better for those who owned at least three designer handbags; indeed, it outperformed analysis. The more expert you become, the better your instincts tend to be. 直觉能力也是可以提升的，我们称之为“刺激管理”。大量研究证实经历越多，直觉也准确。2012年，有一个非常著名的实验。研究人员要求志愿者从一堆设计师款手提包中判断出哪些是真品哪些是仿品。 工作人员要求其中一些人依靠直觉来判断真伪，另一些人则深思熟虑后给出决定。对于那些本身拥有三个设计师款手提包的人来说，依靠直觉的效果要比理性分析的效果好。你约熟悉某个东西，你的直觉效果越好。 However, the real reason to embrace fast thinking is that it is, well, fast. Instinctive decisionmaking is often the only way to get through the day. Researchers at Cornell University once estimated that people make over 200 decisions a day about food alone. The workplace is nothing but a succession of choices, a few big and many small: what to prioritise, when to intervene, whom to avoid in the lifts and, now, where to work each day. 但是，崇尚快速思考的真实原因在于“快”这个字。依靠直觉做出的决定通常是让你顺利渡过一天唯一的办法。 康奈尔大学的研究人员曾经估计过光是吃什么食物这一个问题，一个人每天就要做200多个决定。 而工作场所更是充满着各种选择，一些重大决定以及无数微小决定：哪个是优先级，什么时候介入，电梯里该避开谁，以及到现在的每天要在哪里工作。 Get through 是个动词短语，而且很常用。它的主要含义就是：通过。那么“get through a day”其实就是过完一天，渡过一天。 To take one example, when your inbox brims with new emails at the start of a new day, there is absolutely no way to read them all carefully. Intuition is what helps you decide which ones to answer and which to delete or leave unopened. Emails that are part of existing threads: open. Messages from people directly above and below you: open. Reminders from the chief information officer that cybersecurity really, really matters: delete. 举个例子，新的一天开始，你的收件箱里塞满了新邮件，想要把每一封邮件都仔仔细细地读完是不可能的。那么，直觉就会帮助你做出选择：哪些要回复，哪些要删除或者保持未读状态。 与现在工作主题相关的邮件-打开；直属领导和下属的邮件-打开；来自信息部门提示网络安全重要性的邮件-删除。 Instinct is also at work on those occasions when people have completely zoned out. They might be working on something else during a Zoom call, or playing chess on their phones, or simply admiring the ceiling pattern. Suddenly they are aware of a silence, and realise that they have been asked something or are expected to make a contribution. 直觉也能帮助那些思想开小差的人。在视频开会期间，你可能做其他事情，在手机上玩象棋，或者只是盯着天花板欣赏上面的图案。 突然气氛安静下来，你意识到大家在问你有什么问题或者希望你给点意见。 This is the office equivalent of coming face to face with a lion. Those who are fit to survive will say something plausible like “I’d like to understand how we are measuring success,” prompting murmurs of agreement from everyone else who hasn’t been paying attention but senses this might be a good answer. 这种场景就和面对一头狮子一样可怕。那些“才思敏捷”的人则会说一些似是而非的话，如“我想知道我们是如何评断成功的”。 虽然这句话没啥营养，但正好解救了那些没有认真开会的人，于是大家假装认真讨论起来。 Fast thinking is not just about self-preservation. It can help the entire organisation. The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all. Yet as data gushes from every pore of the modern organisation, the temptation to ask for one more bit of analysis has become much harder to resist. 思考敏捷不仅仅是自我保护，它能帮助整个组织。许多管理决定的价值在于一个简单的事实：木已成舟，决定已经做出。然而，现在组织每个角落的数据表明，人们更希望多一些理性分析。 A wellestablished psychological phenomenon known as “verbal overshadowing” captures the danger of overthinking things: people are more likely to misidentify someone in a line-up if they have spent time writing a description of their faces. Managers often suffer from analytical overshadowing, mulling a simple problem until it turns into a complex one. 一个非常有名的心理学现象叫做“语词遮蔽效应”，它强调了过度思考的危害性：在一队中，如果人们太注重他人的脸部描述，那么识别错误的可能性会更大。 管理者常常会深受分析遮蔽效应其害，将一个问题思考地过于丰满，结果简单问题复杂化了。 When to use intuition in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition. Does the decisionmaker have real expertise in this area? Is this a domain in which emotion matters more than reasoning? Above all, is it worth delaying the decision? Slow thinking is needed to get the big calls right. But fast thinking is the way to stop deliberation turning to dither. 什么时候利用直觉取决于个人的模式识别方式。决策者在这个领域是真才实学吗？这个领域中，情感重要还是理性更重要？最重要的，推迟决定是否值得？ 慢思考需要做大决定而且要做得对。但是，快思考能够防止多虑变成犹豫不决。 |
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