The Expert Sense

Abstract The main idea of this chapter is that expert intuition (the ‘expert sense’) is developed through a lengthy process of skill acquisition. The origins of research into expert intuition are to be found in studies of chess masters. The principles of pattern recognition in chess have been extrapolated to management. Both the amount (notionally ‘10,000’ hours) and the quality (deliberate with expert coaching and feedback) of practice are important in the development of intuitive expertise and the expert sense. Skill acquisition proceeds though a number of stages from ‘novice’ through to ‘expert’. Dreyfus’s ‘Skill Acquisition Model’ (SAM) is centre stage. Novices simply follow rules without taking the subtleties of the context into account, whereas expert performance is situational, holistic, and intuitive. On rare occasions experts are able to achieve a high-level state of ‘flow’. Parallels between expert intuition in the professional fields of nursing and management are discussed. Collective intuition, built by learning, dialogue, and feedback between experts, is proposed as a valuable, rare, and difficult-to-imitate source of competitive advantage for an organization. For expert intuitions to be integrated and institutionalized into an organization, they must first be articulated and interpreted.