Intuition Strategy 101: Defining Actionable Intuition

Your intuition is a data source. Here's how to read it.

I was awake at 5am — up before my alarm, poised at my table, ready to write. Fueled by new ideas, books I was reading, connections I was making. I couldn’t get them down fast enough. I’d sit down to write and the energy would pour out.

Early mornings writing, before I had language for any of this.

Just a few weeks earlier, I was weighing my options, deciding whether to stay or leave my corporate role. My energy was at the opposite end of the spectrum. I was highly emotional. Exhausted but distracting myself from sleep. A defeated tired that had me collapse in my bed after a conference call.

I didn’t have a plan for what to do after I left that role. I just knew I was misaligned and I gave myself time to figure out why.

I paid attention to what I was drawn to: the themes of books I picked up, the conversations that resurfaced, the new activities I enjoyed. I was collecting information and signals before I had a name for what I was building.

That shift — from depleted to energized, from unease to alignment — was data. My body and my attention were telling me something long before my analytical brain had a plan. I just didn’t have language for it yet.

My intention with this article is to give you language for what you’re already sensing.

What is intuition?

Intuition is data. It looks and feels different from the data that we’ve been trained to seek out and trust in our education and professional worlds.

Corporate culture and STEM education have taught us that data must be visible and analytical (source: Industrial & Systems Engineer with 20+ years in corporate strategy and operations). It trained us to believe that trustable data manifests as an output of measurement and spreadsheets and is held in databases.

Yes, analytical data can be useful. But analytical data are not the only data available to us. They don’t tell us the whole story.

Data, at its core, are recorded observations that can come from a variety of sources. As we incorporate more diverse sources of data into our decision making process, we can begin to fill out a more complete picture of the situation.

One category of these complementary sources of data is Intuition. Your intuition is informed and trained by your past experience and expertise — every project completed, meeting held, course taken, conversation had. Your intuition is your on-demand, inner trusted advisor.

Intuition is valid, informative data, but it just doesn’t exist on a spreadsheet. In Intuition Strategy®, this is called “invisible data,” and I have developed frameworks and practices to collect, summarize, interpret and communicate these data to create a much richer understanding of a decision.

When we learn how to collect, understand and use alternate types of data that also reflect — and often more accurately describe — our real-time current state, we move beyond the limited data set that measures the past with numbers and analysis.

Intuition is a real data source. It carries signals that most leaders already receive. And still, most organizations have never built infrastructure to use and deploy this valuable information.

When we use both sources of data — analytical and invisible — we have a more complete set of information we need to make hard decisions with confidence.

Decisions are built on intuition AND strategy

The foundation of Intuition Strategy® starts with Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. In this pioneering book, Kahneman defines two systems of thinking. Fast thinking is the quick, instantaneous system that produces impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. Slow thinking is where our analytical processing happens: planning, strategy, and analysis.

Intuition lives in the fast system, alongside fear, emotion, and bias. This is why it gets mistaken for its less reliable cousins and why it gets a bad rap. Many decision makers I work with have admitted that they question if others in their organization will trust what can’t be proven by showing their work.

Intuition Strategy® combines both systems because we need both. We have been biologically equipped with fast and slow thinking to make confident decisions and act on them to create change in our systems. Neither is good or bad, better or worse. Using both allows us to check our fast cognition to determine who is speaking — is it truly intuition or a different voice? — and use this thinking strategically to act with conviction.

Human AI: The Actionable Intuition™ Algorithm

Throughout your life you have had countless experiences that built your very own data source of valuable invisible data. This data has been training your algorithm — your Human AI — across your lifetime. In this case, AI is not an artificial intelligence. It is the most humanly intelligent algorithm. This AI is your Actionable Intuition™.

Your Human AI algorithm takes every new experience that you encounter and compares it to the existing invisible data that you have within your trained data pool of expertise and wisdom. It is constantly sensing patterns and determining if new information you encounter aligns or is incongruent with the existing data that has trained your algorithm.

The output of this algorithm is not analytical data — the numbers, charts, predictions or whatever ChatGPT tells us that we’ve learned to expect as algorithmic output. The output of Human AI comes through different forms and sensory channels.

Forms and Channels of Intuition

Intuition output has recognizable forms and channels and therefore, we can learn to recognize these outputs. In You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition, Dr. Laura Huang defines the three forms of intuition evident in research: eureka moments, spidey sense, and jolts.

• Eureka moments are when your algorithm makes a positive match between your existing data pool and new information that you encounter. Something clicks into place and you have an “aha!” eureka moment.

• Spidey sense is when the new information does not match with your existing invisible data set and you get the feeling that something is off.

• Jolts are when you get new information that does not match your existing data set and this causes you to re-examine your data. You realize something has changed and you reevaluate information you had previously considered to be truthful.

Much of the research on intuition sorts it into types and sources. My focus is on delivery — the channel your signal arrives through. In my work with leaders and through the reading I’ve done, I have identified four channels through which we typically sense these outputs. When you can tune into the delivery of your intuition, you more readily notice when it speaks.

Each of our Human AI algorithms behaves differently — the outputs will look, sound, and feel unique to your own experience. Some of these outputs are not commonly identified as intuition. Learning to identify how your intuition shows up requires attention, time and practice. Once you know what your own intuition sounds like, you can learn to understand what it tells you and eventually trust it to use in your decisions.

The four channels are:

• Cognitive – you have a thought or an idea that just suddenly pops into your head. Think of this as a “pattern pop” of intuition. This most often occurs when you have the space and quiet to allow the eureka moments to happen. Common examples I hear often are being in the shower and getting a great idea or out on a run and knowing the answer to a problem that you’ve been thinking about for days.

• Physical – you feel something in your body, such as the prototypical “gut sensation”. It can range from a funny feeling in the pit of your stomach, goose bumps and chills, to a tightness in your neck. I often think about walking into a room and picking up on the vibes before I even speak with someone.

• Relational – you feel a nudge towards or a sense a repulsion from a person or a thing. A common example is when someone comes to your mind and when you reach out to them with a call or text they say, “Oh how funny, I was just talking about you.”

• Generative – you get the urge to create something. You might be in a meeting in a conference room and spring into action mode, jumping up to sketch your idea on a whiteboard or scribbling a quick back-of-the-napkin prototype of an idea at a restaurant. This could also be a creative work, like writing a song, a poem or dancing.

How do I know if it’s really intuition?

If intuition is so closely related to the other types of fast thinking — fear, emotion, and bias — how do you know when intuition is speaking? Here are two techniques to help discern if you hear intuition or one of the other less reliable voices.

Slow it down – Dr. Huang says fear is loud and intuition is quiet. Sometimes the loudest voices are not the ones that are the most consistent or the most truthful. When you sense fast thinking, get curious about what it is saying and what is behind it. Slow it down. Often you will discover additional information that provides clues to which voice is speaking – do you detect similarity to another person or prior situation (is it bias?), limiting beliefs (is that you, fear?), a deep desire (hey jealousy) – and what else is behind it? What you find as you dig deeper is often your quiet intuition.

Test it – When you sense intuition, take note how it shows up. Which form is it in: eureka, spidey sense or jolt? What channel did it come through: physical, relational, generative or cognitive? Then be on the lookout. Does it return? Do you hear the same message through different channels? Perhaps you receive a reinforcing sensation when you think about the idea that came to you on a walk. You might find the urge to sketch out a persistent idea and talk through it with someone else. See what comes next and what data you can gather as you test this spark.

Know what to look for

You don’t need a 5am epiphany to know your intuition is working. You need to know what to look for. The next time something clicks, a situation feels off, or an idea won’t leave you alone, pay attention to the form and the channel. Take notes and stay curious about how your intuition guides you through a decision.

Recognizing intuition is the first skill. The second is knowing when to act on it — when to move fast, and when to slow down. Intuition without action is just a daydream. That’s where we go next.

Leah Goldman, The Intuition Strategist, helps leaders trust their gut to make fast confident decisions and get aligned results. Learn more at IntuitionStrategist.com

©2023-2026 Leah Goldman LLC (dba The Intuition Strategist). All rights reserved.