What do you do if your Higher Education career decisions are solely based on intuition?

Intuition refers to the ability to understand or know something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning or evidence. It often involves a gut feeling or immediate insight that guides decision-making or understanding, even when the reasoning behind it isn't immediately clear. Intuition can be influenced by past experiences, knowledge, and subconscious processing, allowing individuals to make quick judgments or decisions in complex situations. It's often described as a form of unconscious or instinctive knowledge that arises spontaneously.

Intuitions can also help a person take risks. Thus, even if a person takes a risk based on their intuition and fails, still they will learn something valuable from their mistakes. However, it is important to take calculated risks.

If the issue requires your tacit knowledge especially on human management and certain aspect on research intuition is viable on my past experience. On administrative and strategy planning its best to steer away and stick to the SOPs as this reduces biasness and emotion driven decisions

In my experience you could rely on intuition when faced with complex, ambiguous, or time-sensitive decisions where data may be limited or inconclusive. Also, intuition can spark innovative ideas and solutions that may not be immediately evident through analytical reasoning alone. Also it could help in understanding students' needs, preferences, and motivations. Finally intuition can guide quick decision-making and address immediate challenges in crises or emergencies. I would not recommend relying solely on intuition in situations where comprehensive data is available. Intuition alone may not be sufficient for complex statistical or quantitative analyses, long-term strategic planning nor in identifying potential risks.

It's good to be thoughtful and have time to make decisions. I would see the best way as: 1. Get as much data and make evidenced based decision; 2. Ask experts and suggest them to interpret evidenced findings. 3. Take time and look into 1&2 4. Make your own decision.

It's critical to understand the impact of the decision and get more clarity on the context. In Academia with "weak connections" between many professors and high hierarchy between departments quite big complexity of multiple parameters and huge (up to 5 years) inertia. This means that some decisions made by University leader will impact Institution, when the person retire from the position. True leader use their intuition and make right decisions, based on their dream of Polar Star metric.

Talk to people. Ask how they talk about projects, colleagues and the institute itself. Their expressions and choice of words can give you a far better clarification than just your instincts.

Sometimes you really do need to trust your instincts and intuition. Academia is slow to change - tradition is what draws many of us to it - yet this can stop us from pursuing creative ideas that are outside academia’s usual operating system. To forge new partnerships we need to be willing to step outside of our comfort zone and make new connections, propose new ideas, and do things differently. Some people will push back. Tell you it’s not how things are done. But know when to ignore the naysayers and go after that new proposal idea, teach in a new way, recruit a non-traditional student, collaborate radically across boundaries.

I agree with Jilian Goldfarb that a nontraditional focus in-between academia and industry is exciting. Follow the encouragement of your mentors and use your own judgment. Mine was a multidisciplinary approach, always expecting to return to graduate school for a PhD. After eleven years as a research chemical engineer with DuPont and seeing them acquire Conoco Oil in 1981 my choice was a PhD in Quantitative Modeling and Finance. I had to take one year as an MBA student and was then accepted into the PhD program. Finishing the MBA was not required, I was urged to find a research project, which was based on Lenos Trigeorgis '86 PhD at Harvard on Real Options. I reached out to him and his advisors at MIT. Added a JD degree in Technology Law.