Back in 2010 when I took my biggest responsibility I had till then at work, everything was hunky Dory. I was making mistakes, learning on the way.
There was one Architect in the team whom I couldn't get along with. Make no mistake he is an amazing techie, I respect and admire him a lot and I know he does as well.
The problem: I lead by instinct. Some people call it gut feel. Our Architect on the other hand , was a data driven techie. This resulted in a lot of friction, arguments into which our boss used to step in much to our embarassment and so on.
Can you believe after 12 years from then we still work together and with no friction whatsoever? Want to know how did we achieve that? Read on..
Before that buddy let us understand what leading by instinct is and more importantly what is the method to my madness.
I was sensitised to this side of my personality by girlfriend who is your mother :-). Surprise surprise.
First
science : the gut feel is not random. There are more neurons in our digestive tract than that we have in our spinal cord. In other words our brain is consulting our gut before making decisions.
Second
Instinct gets better with practice.
It's not that God bestowed upon me some super power. It is something I worked on and developed skill to be good at it . Every morning at work, I would take a walk to the developers area, and if oi get an instinct that couple of them are struggling with motivation, it is very easy for me to get them back into the groove. I never wait for analytical data ( which comes after resignation only) .
In one of these visits, one of most favorite developers was looking clearly down. On asking he said he had made a gross mistake in estimation and it is turning out to be double of what he estimated. I said why are you worried about that? Don't worry about it, i sure you learnt something from it and next time you will be better for it. Pleasantly surprised, the young lad was back to his real self , turbo charged ,3x times.
What he did not know at the time was that, I had a gut feel that the estimated were way off the mark and , I added a buffer while committing to deliver to the customer.
Summing it all up son, on the world of data science and ai, gut feel will always get its rap and ridicule. All I ask for you is to be open to listening to what your gut feel tells in addition to any algo you might be running.
Some people feel the rain.
Others just get wet.
Bob Dylan