Knowing by intuiting

Part of the symposium "Intuition in Organizations: Empirical Research with Training Implications" organized by Marta Sinclair.
The study explores whether knowledge workers resort to intuiting at times when sufficient, reliable, timely data is not available. Intuiting has been conceptualized for the purpose of this study a sensory-based way of knowing, comprised of sensing plus sensemaking (Bas, Dörfler, & Sinclair, 2019). It adds to the existing definition of intuition as knowing that bypasses conscious reasoning, and results into knowing without knowing how we know (Sinclair & Ashkanasy, 2005). We collected and analyzed 261 Facebook posts written by 20 clinicians about their daily experience during the first wave of COVID-19 in New York, and followed up by 12 interviews with clinicians and 15 interviews with non-clinical knowledge workers about their experience extreme context. Study participants' accounts of experiencing intuition include various types of sensations, such as "Tension in the stomach", "Something in the air doesn't feel right", or "The puzzle doesn't come together". Empirical data demonstrate that even when participants cannot specify whether their intuition is an idea or a feeling, they recognize intuition as 'a particular solution that seems or feels like a good fit'.