Here’s a familiar bit of egg-headed decision making, to prove to you it is the brain that’s the problem, not the gut.
Ask the grunts/troops/anyone who is actually writing code: how do you really feel? Most feel in their gut things got too complex and bad decisions are being made.
If these engineers only actually listened to their gut, they would be pushing back hard to get complexity reigned in, to get back to a much cleaner architecture. But for a myriad of reasons, such as not wanting to appear clueless in a fast changing tech world, the engineers stay silent.
The rationalization is a very brain activity.
Do a reality check on yourself. What feels have you been rationalizing or dismissing? Take a look by observing—what kind of feeling is it? Where is it in your body? (A lump in your throat, tightness in your stomach?) Observe what it is. Don’t explain it away or it will stop being observable.
Once you observe, you will learn new information, which will then inform your subsequent decisions.
The scenario you outline is of a person experienced in a technical field having second thoughts about something, but not raising the concerns sure to external factors.
This is very different from the scenarios mentioned by the GP, where people who are not experienced in the technical field (i.e. not immunologists or HVAC engineer, respectively) ignore the advice of people who are experts, just because it feels right to them in their gut.
I would say, listen to experts (and not your gut) when outside of your field, and listen to your gut (but not only your gut) when in your field.
I agree that listening to expert advice over your gut is the right thing to do.
But that’s besides the point—-learning to trust expert advice is a brain behavior that has to be properly learned. (For example, many of us have learned to catastrophize and over-generalize, where bad advice from one expert suddenly translates into not listening to all future experts).
I’m imploring: do not dismiss your gut, folks! Please continue to use brain, but stop dismissing your gut.
Ask the grunts/troops/anyone who is actually writing code: how do you really feel? Most feel in their gut things got too complex and bad decisions are being made.
If these engineers only actually listened to their gut, they would be pushing back hard to get complexity reigned in, to get back to a much cleaner architecture. But for a myriad of reasons, such as not wanting to appear clueless in a fast changing tech world, the engineers stay silent.
The rationalization is a very brain activity.
Do a reality check on yourself. What feels have you been rationalizing or dismissing? Take a look by observing—what kind of feeling is it? Where is it in your body? (A lump in your throat, tightness in your stomach?) Observe what it is. Don’t explain it away or it will stop being observable.
Once you observe, you will learn new information, which will then inform your subsequent decisions.