With boso, ibtalk and now auctomatic, the instinctive decisions have always been the best. I'm wary of the term 'common sense' because I don't really think it's all that common. Also, what's really weird, is that at time x, you can believe 100% and with everything in your heart that decision y is the best course of action. At x + 3 days, you can then believe, also 100% without any doubt, that decision y was wrong and that you should now do z. It's not that that is indecision, it's just that things can move so quickly and variables change so much that you can change your mind 100% about something without too much difficulty. (and I've been using 100% too much). I believe an important quality of a CEO is to be able to do that, and continually convince himself that the latest course of action is the most prudent, but more importantly, convince his team that it is the right path to take too, (and that bit of advice came to me from someone who works at Yelp).
Question is: Do you really need something like gut instinct?
I think there's one thing that it is appropriate for: Quickly needed decisions with a "social background", if you are experienced at judging human behavior (I don't know the exact English word for "Menschenkenntnis").
Else: Don't do it. Do not decide based on pure gut instinct. Try to get something more dependable: Ask friends, ask experts, talk to people who know more than you or provide a different point of view and then judge their comments against each other. There's almost always a way to get the information you need if you have the time, and it's very seldom you don't have time.
Then it brakes down to experience and self-confidence, I guess. Luckily, my gut instinct is right, usually :-)
One of the reasons I asked this question is because recently I participated in a webinar by marketingexperiments.com . The folks at MEC said they tested three different price points for a product - $10, $12, $15 (something like that) and asked the audience, many of whom were marketing professionals, which price they thought performed the best. The majority of them were wrong.
The moral, in that case, was that a marketer's instinct is a fine thing, but doing online testing gives you real knowledge of the situation. By doing testing not only can you learn if your instinct is right, but you can glean information about your users/visitors as well.
Another way to frame the idea would be to rely more on your subconscious - all those automatic responses to situations based on a lifetime of experience. This is standard practice for designers who spend a great deal of time absorbing the aspects of a problem at hand, then put it aside. A minute/hour/day/week later comes the Aha!, a subconsciously formed integration solving the problem. (No magic involved).
One experiment I tried was for a very large multiple choice test. (For the Architect exam, 3 days of 10 hour tests). I found that when taking the practice test, 95% of the time that I went back and changed an answer, thinking I had answered it wrong the first time, I actually changed it from right to wrong. So for the actual test, I went through the test once only with one answer, left hours before every one else, and aced it. The moral: The Subconscious is a good thing - you can rely on it.
Does your gut instinct lead you to make good decisions more often than bad ones? Does it work better for you in some areas than in others? For example, are your decisions about marketing more often right than your decisions about strategy? Or does it work better for you with small decisions compared to large ones?
Back when I was in school I noticed a pattern emerge while taking tests over freshman year: If I changed a test answer a statistically HUGE amount of the time I changed it from the correct answer to an incorrect one. After noticing this pattern I stopped second guessing myself!
I actually noticed the opposite pattern: about 95% of the time, the double-check caught careless mistakes and I ended up with a higher score for it. Perhaps it was because of my typical test-taking strategy: I'd race through the questions and answer every one immediately, then I'd go back and double-check all the steps to make sure I hadn't done anything silly.
I did notice that my score tended to decrease if I triple- or quadruple-checked my answers, though.
Last semester I had a professor who banned changing answers once you fill it in on the scantron. That means no erasers. He gave a similar line of reasoning as your experience.
